3) The Hidden Brain

We don't feel 20 times sadder when we hear that 20 people have died in a disaster than when we hear that one person has died, even though the magnitude of the tragedy is 20 times as large.

We can reach such a conclusion abstractly, in our conscious minds, but we cannot feel it viscerally, because that is the domain of the hidden brain, and the hidden brain is simply not calibrated to deal with the difference between a single death and 20 deaths.

“The Hidden Brain” is the part of our mind that is not ordinarily accessible to our consciousness through introspection. In other words, we don’t know that it is there, and can’t detect it just by thinking about it. But it controls many things that we do, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse.Vedantam concludes that it developed in human beings to promote survival under primitive conditions, and is still performing its functions today, whether they are appropriate to our current circumstances or not.

"In The Hidden Brain, one of America's best science journalists describes how our unconscious minds influence everything from criminal trials to charitable giving, from suicide bombers to presidential elections. The Hidden Brain is a smart and engaging exploration of the science behind the headlines—and of the little man behind the screen. Don't miss it."

—Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness

When It’s Head Versus Heart,

The Heart Wins

Science shows that when we are deciding

which candidate to support,

anxiety, enthusiasm and whom we identify with

count more than reason or logic.

How Obama Got It Right in 2009

Morality drives policy. Too often, progressives have tried it the other way around, then looked on in dismay as conservatives led with their moral view and won one policy fight after another, even when polling showed most Americans disagreed with conservative policies!

On Thursday night, President Obama didn't make this mistake. Instead, he spoke to our better angels, confidently, forcefully and inclusively. He seized the moral authority with his grammar and demeanor: "Pass this jobs bill" is an imperative sentence; it attributes authority to the speaker. The repetition is a reminder of moral authority.

The speech was remarkable in many ways. It was plainspoken, Trumanesque. It focused on the progressive moral worldview that has from the beginning been the life force of American democracy. In virtually every sentence, it was a call for cooperative joint action for the benefit of all.

Let's look at the way Obama articulated the progressive moral worldview that recognizes both personal and social responsibility. He said:

Yes, we are rugged individualists. Yes, we are strong and self-reliant. And it has been the drive and initiative of our workers and entrepreneurs that has made this economy the engine and envy of the world.But there has always been another thread running throughout our history -- a belief that there are some things we can only do together, as a nation...

Ask yourselves -- where would we be right now if the people who sat here before us decided not to build our highways, not to build our bridges, our dams, our airports? What would this country be like if we had chosen not to spend money on public high schools, or research universities, or community colleges? Millions of returning heroes, including my grandfather, had the opportunity to go to school because of the GI Bill. Where would we be if they hadn't had that chance?

No single individual built America on their own. We built it together. We have been, and always will be, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all; a nation with responsibilities to ourselves and with responsibilities to one another. Members of Congress, it is time for us to meet our responsibilities.

Democracy, in the American tradition, has been defined by a simple morality: We Americans care about our fellow citizens, we act on that care and build trust, and we do our best not just for ourselves, our families, and our friends and neighbors, but for our country, for each other, for people we have never seen and never will see.
American Democracy has, over our history, called upon citizens to share an equal responsibility to work together to secure a safe and prosperous future for their families and nation. This is the central work of our democracy and it is a public enterprise. This, the American Dream, is the dream of a functioning democracy.

That is the progressive moral view Obama used to such great effect Thursday night. However important particular policy prescriptions may be, they do not automatically evoke this moral view. No listener moves from Obama's talk of extending the social security tax holiday to the heartfelt understanding that we are responsible for one another.

Obama showed us he understood that policy flows from morality. That is why he articulated the morality behind his recommendations at the climactic moment of his speech. From this morality, he said, all else follows.

There are other things to note in the speech. One of those was his choice to say, "You should pass this jobs plan right away." The unusual imperative formulation is "right away." Typically, a politician would structure the imperative around the words "now" or "immediately." Such language, however, wouldn't fit the morality Obama hoped to embody Wednesday night.

"Do it now," is strict parent or authoritarian language. It is, "Do what I say." There's no less urgency in "right away," but there is a sense of "join us on this righteous path." The reason is that "away" is a spatial word that traces a path from where we are in a forward direction, a path of action toward the achievement of an accepted goal. It is inclusive and welcoming, while also indicating the urgency of the request. By using "right away," Obama skillfully communicated that we all in this together.

The president also explicitly rejected the conservative moral view of personal responsibility without social responsibility: the idea that no one should have to pay for anyone else, that paying for a government that helps fellow citizens who require help is immoral.

But what we can't do -- what I won't do -- is let this economic crisis be used as an excuse to wipe out the basic protections that Americans have counted on for decades. I reject the idea that we need to ask people to choose between their jobs and their safety. I reject the argument that says for the economy to grow, we have to roll back protections that ban hidden fees by credit card companies, or rules that keep our kids from being exposed to mercury, or laws that prevent the health insurance industry from shortchanging patients. I reject the idea that we have to strip away collective bargaining rights to compete in a global economy. We shouldn't be in a race to the bottom, where we try to offer the cheapest labor and the worst pollution standards. America should be in a race to the top. And I believe we can win that race.In fact, this larger notion that the only thing we can do to restore prosperity is just dismantle government, refund everyone's money, let everyone write their own rules, and tell everyone they're on their own -- that's not who we are. That's not the story of America.

If you look at policies alone, policies that have been proposed by both Democrats and Republicans, you miss the main event. The very idea of working together for the good of fellow citizens in need of help is a progressive idea; it is the idea behind the view of democracy that has sustained America from its beginning.

Conservatives are not going to like cooperating on Obama's jobs plan. The very idea contradicts much of what they believe.

Meanwhile, the president put them in a bind. If they co-operate in helping their fellow citizens, they violate their code of personal responsibility without social responsibility. If they don't co-operate, they look callous and irresponsible.

Blog Entries by George Lakoff

The Santorum Strategy is not just about Santorum. It is about pounding the most radical conservative ideas into the public mind by constant repetition during the Republican presidential campaign, whether by Santorum himself, by Gingrich or Ron Paul, by an intimidated Romney, or by the Republican House majority. The Republican...

Progressives had some fun last week with Frank Luntz, who told the Republican Governors' Association that he was scared to death of the Occupy movement and recommended language to combat what the movement had achieved. But the progressive critics mostly just laughed, said his language wouldn't work, and assumed that...

What's next? That's the question being asked as cities close down Occupy encampments and winter approaches.

The answer is simple. Just as the Tea Party gained power, the Occupy Movement can. The Occupy movement has raised awareness of a great many of America's real issues and has organized supporters across...

I was asked weeks ago by some in the Occupy Wall Street movement to make suggestions for how to frame the movement. I have hesitated so far, because I think the movement should be framing itself. It's a general principle: Unless you frame yourself, others will frame you -- the...

My wife, Kathleen, and I stood gaping at the TV as we watched the towers fall. Kathleen said to me, "Do you realize what Bush and Cheney are going to do with this?" We both realized very well. Until 9/11, the Bush presidency was weak. On 9/11, Cheney understood that...

Morality drives policy. Too often, progressives have tried it the other way around, then looked on in dismay as conservatives led with their moral view and won one policy fight after another, even when polling showed most Americans disagreed with conservative policies!

Democracy, in the American tradition, has been defined by a simple morality: We Americans care about our fellow citizens, we act on that care and build trust, and we do our best not just for ourselves, our families, and our friends and neighbors, but for our country, for each other,...

Last week, on April 13, 2011, President Obama gave all Democrats and all progressives a remarkable gift. Most of them barely noticed. They looked at the president's speech as if it were only about budgetary details. But the speech went well beyond the budget. It went to the heart of...

The Wisconsin protests are about much more than budgets and unions. As I observed in "What Conservatives Really Want," the conservative story about budget deficits is a ruse to turn the country conservative in every area. Karl Rove and Shep Smith have made it clear...

For the first two years of his administration, President Obama had no overriding narrative, no frame to define his policymaking, no way to make sense of what he was trying to do. As of his 2011 State of the Union Address, he has one: Competitiveness.

There is no ideology of the "center." What is called a "centrist" or a "moderate" is actually very different -- a bi-conceptual, someone who is conservative on some issues and progressive on others, in many, many possible combinations. Why does this matter? From the perspective of how the brain works,...

The usual pundits, for all their verbiage, have missed a lot, especially since they have nobody from the cognitive and brain sciences discussing the election. Here's part of what's been missing from the discussion.

First, conservatives have an extensive, but not obvious communications system, with many think tanks, framing experts,...

Today, September 28, 2010, EcoAmerica is hosting an important environmental conference, America The Best, in Washington, DC, for a small group of specialists in environmental communication to see what ideas emerge. Because of the number of distinguished participants, I compressed my ideas to just a few pages. I...

The Democratic response to the Republican Pledge to America has been factual about its economics. The September 26, 2010 Sunday New York Times editorial goes through the economic details, and Democrats have been citing the economic facts from the Congressional Budget Office. As Dan Pfeiffer reports

The issue is death -- death gushing at ten thousand pounds per square inch from a mile below the sea, tens of thousands of barrels of death a day. Not just death to eleven human beings. Death to sea birds, sea turtles, dolphins, fish, oyster beds, shrimp, beaches; death to...

The Third

Industrial Revolution:

How Lateral Power

Will Transform Society

The Industrial Revolution, powered by oil and other fossil fuels, is spiraling into a dangerous endgame. The price of gas and food are climbing, unemployment remains high, the housing market has tanked, consumer and government debt is soaring, and the recovery is slowing. Facing the prospect of a second collapse of the global economy, humanity is desperate for a sustainable economic game plan to take us into the future.

Here, Jeremy Rifkin explores how Internet technology and renewable energy are merging to create a powerful “Third Industrial Revolution.” He asks us to imagine hundreds of millions of people producing their own green energy in their homes, offices, and factories, and sharing it with each other in an “energy internet,” just like we now create and share information online.

Rifkin describes how the five-pillars of the Third Industrial Revolution will create thousands of businesses, millions of jobs, and usher in a fundamental reordering of human relationships, from hierarchical to lateral power, that will impact the way we conduct commerce, govern society, educate our children, and engage in civic life.

Rifkin’s vision is already gaining traction in the international community. The European Union Parliament has issued a formal declaration calling for its implementation, and other nations in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, are quickly preparing their own initiatives for transitioning into the new economic paradigm.

The Third Industrial Revolution is an insider’s account of the next great economic era, including a look into the personalities and players — heads of state, global CEOs, social entrepreneurs, and NGOs — who are pioneering its implementation around the world.

Rifkin's "third" industrial revolution is based on "five pillars

:

" (1) A general shift to renewable energy.

(2) Micro-generation of clean energy in homes, offices and other buildings.

(3) Hydrogen and other forms of energy storage in homes and throughout the economy

(4) an "Internet-like" smart energy grid that would allow individuals to generate power and then distribute it, and

OF THE MODERN WORLD ECONOMY

by Kenneth Pomeranz

Numero di pagine: 380

The Great Divergence

The Great Divergence

brings new insight to one of the classic questions

of history

:

Why did sustained industrial growth begin in Northwest Europe, despite surprising similarities between advanced areas of Europe and East Asia?

As Ken Pomeranz shows, as recently as 1750, parallels between these two parts of the world were very high in life expectancy, consumption, product and factor markets, and the strategies of households. Perhaps most surprisingly, Pomeranz demonstrates that the Chinese and Japanese cores were no worse off ecologically than Western Europe. Core areas throughout the eighteenth-century Old World faced comparable local shortages of land-intensive products, shortages that were only partly resolved by trade.

Pomeranz argues that Europe's nineteenth-century divergence from the Old World owes much to the fortunate location of coal, which substituted for timber. This made Europe's failure to use its land intensively much less of a problem, while allowing growth in energy-intensive industries. Another crucial difference that he notes has to do with trade. Fortuitous global conjunctures made the Americas a greater source of needed primary products for Europe than any Asian periphery. This allowed Northwest Europe to grow dramatically in population, specialize further in manufactures, and remove labor from the land, using increased imports rather than maximizing yields. Together, coal and the New World allowed Europe to grow along resource-intensive, labor-saving paths.

Meanwhile, Asia hit a cul-de-sac. Although the East Asian hinterlands boomed after 1750, both in population and in manufacturing, this growth prevented these peripheral regions from exporting vital resources to the cloth-producing Yangzi Delta. As a result, growth in the core of East Asia's economy essentially stopped, and what growth did exist was forced along labor-intensive, resource-saving paths--paths Europe could have been forced down, too, had it not been for favorable resource stocks from underground and overseas.

de cause à effet de l’histoire est impossible.

How The Chinese Became

Global Branding Geniuses

In the same way China approached its preparations for the Beijing Olympics, businesses have fully detailed each sensory impression a product will have on consumers. One company's ultimate objective: Become a global leader in car manufacturing. Look out, Detroit.

There I stood, having just been given permission to see an area of a building that few were allowed to enter. As I opened the door to the first room, the unmistakable smell of freshly cut grass pervaded my senses. The air was misty, the colors were light green, and the Mandarin name of the room I'd just entered, translated, meant "The people from the Nordic countries." With my Danish background, it was comfortably familiar--the colors seemed lifted directly from the designer Arne Jacobsen's catalogue, the smell took me right back to my parents' garden, and the air was full of spring sounds Scandinavian birds make at dusk.

The building I found myself in was huge--about the size of a football stadium--and it was located some 200 miles outside of Beijing. With the same level of zeal its country used in preparing for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, this business was fully detailing each sensory impression its products will have on potential consumers. For this business, the objective is to become a global leader in car manufacturing. Here, thousands of cars were lined up to leave an ultra-modern production facility, which, until recently, featured all the familiar global brands. Now, there was a new take on it. The cars that stretched, row upon row, were all Chinese brands designed specifically to appeal to foreign markets.

The world soon will see the ability of the Chinese to absorb new ideas, and fast-track them into the mainstream with accuracy, skill, and speed. In a very short time--despite a rocky start--they have grasped the essence of branding. In fact, their embrace of the fact that branding is a sensory discovery has put them ahead of others in the same industry operating on the other side of the globe.

Beside the Nordic room was another room, one that focused on precision and detail. Surprising details of how, for example, Germans perceive mechanical movement, compared to the Chinese idea. Looking at a sliding door, it opens slowly, then speeds up, before slowing down to a perfect stop. In contrast, the Chinese door would swish open quickly and stop with an abrupt bang. The colors--gunmetal gray, black, white, puce, and olive. The shapes--perfectly symmetrical. The sounds--deeply resonant. Overall--a very conservative feel. Welcome to Germany.

For almost three years, a team of scientists, researchers, anthropologists, and psychologists traveled the world to study the most inspirational and innovative countries in the world. They carefully selected the best features of those countries, focusing on those aspects that could influence the evolution of Chinese brands, shape their innovation process, define their future, and most importantly, serve as a model for their success.

It seems like history repeating itself. Way back in the 1980s, the Japanese developed their version of the "German Room." In order to surpass competing nations, they had to fully understand how they worked. They learned their lessons well, and Japan went on to build among the best-selling cars in the world.

China wants to be next. But they didn't start out as naturals at understanding how branding works.

Over the years I've worked with Chinese people, I've been somewhat taken aback by their perspective on the world. Their skill in producing sophisticated technological products is awe-inspiring. And yet, when it came to understanding the concept of branding, they seemed to struggle with the notion.

After spending weeks and weeks inside some of the largest Chinese companies teaching the fundamentals of creating an emotional brand, a CEO approached me, indirectly of course, to ask when we would begin work on creating the actual brand. For him, all the emotional stuff seemed irrelevant. The business was the product. This was particularly striking in light of the fact that, more than any others, the Chinese have an even greater passion for brands than, say, Russian or Japanese consumers. A recent study reveals that the average Chinese consumer feels the need to wear at least three branded items to feel comfortable at work. Yet, when probed further, they were at a loss, unable to define the features of a brand. However, they had no difficulty describing the product. It seems that for them, the product is the brand. The emotional connection is simply absent.

The irony of this did not escape me as I found myself in this exclusive area of European sensibilities, the Nordic room and the German room. Especially given the fact that the very CEO who wondered when the "real" branding of his product was going to begin had commissioned more than 200 people to create an unprecedented database of the world's consumer profiles.

At the end of the day, that very same CEO was so proud as he asked me what I thought. The answer was obvious--I was more than impressed. I was intrigued to understand the end result of our work.

I asked him what he intended calling his new car. I imagined a Toyota-like name, or perhaps one with a German lilt. He looked at me, answering with absolute certainty, "It will be a Chinese name, of course." He was firmly convinced that the time has come for the Western world to understand that there's another language dominating the conversation, and that's Mandarin. He went on to explain that the brand would only be written in Chinese, because, after all, there are enough people in the world who speak and read Mandarin, and it may very well be to others' advantage to learn to do so, too.

In the same way as when he first asked me to focus more on branding in my training sessions, and then to subsequently see him learning and changing his mind, something altered in his demeanor. It was like the last word had been spoken. He meant what he said. Soon we will find it necessary to speak Mandarin--especially when buying the brands of tomorrow.

Martin Lindstrom is a 2009 recipient of TIME Magazine's “World's 100 Most Influential People” and author of Buyology—Truth and Lies About Why We Buy (Doubleday, New York), a New York Times and Wall Street Journal best–seller. A frequent advisor to heads of numerous Fortune 100 companies, Lindstrom has also authored 5 best-sellers translated into 30 languages.

On Jobs: Tell It Like It Is

Washington is waiting for Obama. Next week, the president has scheduled a big speech to propose new measures to create jobs and get the economy going.Reports are that the administration is still undecided whether to put forth a bold plan or propose measures that might pass the Republican Congress.

'Do not look at what is possible -- look at what is necessary...

If you only propose what you think they'll [the Republican Congress] accept, they control the agenda."

Republicans have already made this an easy choice, by denouncing virtually any idea out of the president as dead on arrival. Their "jobs plan" involves cutting spending, rolling back financial regulation, repealing health care reform, subsidizing big oil, and passing more corporate trade deals. This would cost jobs, and make the economy less competitive in the long run. They are either wrong-headed or willing to sustain mass unemployment in order to insure Obama's defeat. Or both.

So half measures aren't likely to pass anyway. And worse, they constitute presidential malpractice, using the "bully pulpit" to confuse rather than educate the American people about the straits we are in. Far better simply to tell it like it is.

But progressives shouldn't be waiting on Obama in any case. It is long past time for Democrats in the Congress to put forth a bold plan to revive America and put people back to work. Let the White House ignore it and Republicans scorn it. Take it to the country. The faltering economy and sustained mass unemployment will make it more and more compelling. Eventually, the president will figure out he needs to run on something. The bold agenda will frame the choice for Americans to decide in the election.

So what would that agenda look like? There is no shortage of good ideas. For a series on big ideas on making America work, go here..

Here is my version.

Get the Challenge Right

The economy is barely growing. Twenty-five million Americans are in need of full time work. One in four teenagers not in college can't find a job. Wages aren't keeping up with prices. Our trade deficit is rising, as more and more good jobs get shipped abroad. Nearly one in three homes with a mortgage is underwater, worth less than the mortgage.

Moreover, there is no old healthy economy to recover to. The old economy didn't work for most Americans even when it was growing. The cancer was spreading before it metastasized in the financial panic. In the so-called Bush recovery years before the collapse, the few captured all the rewards of growth. Most households lost ground. That economy was builton unsustainable debt. We were hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs and borrowing $2 billion a day from abroad. And we were in complete denial about global warming and the catastrophic climate changes that have already begun.

We can't recover to that old economy -- and we wouldn't want to.

So the task is not simply to give the economy a stimulus, like a dead car battery that just needs a booster cable and a charge to get it going again. We need to rebuild the engine and modernize the wiring, creating a new strategy for America in the global economy even as we put people back to work.

Ironically, no one has made this case better than Barack Obama, most notably inhis "Economic Sermon on the Mount"at Georgetown University in April 2009. (Maybe if the president just re-read some of his old speeches...)

Elements of a Real Jobs Agenda

Given that reality, consider the following elements of a new strategy:

•

Revive Manufacturing in America

We must end the unsustainable global imbalances that drive us ever further into foreign indebtedness. That would best be done with global cooperation -- the surplus nations like China exporting less; the deficit nations like the U.S. making more at home and selling more abroad. But we can gain that cooperation only by setting out an independent course to revive manufacturing in the U.S. and to balance our trade.

This requires a national plan for manufacturing -- targeting industries, coordinating research, providing incentives and training, and repealing tax laws that reward companies for shipping jobs abroad. It requires a new trade strategy, insisting that every major nation play by the same set of rules, taking direct action against mercantilist nations like China that protect their markets, rig their currencies and steal our technology. Buy America should be a mandate on all federal, state and local government purchases, consistent with our trade laws.

•

Capture a Lead in the Green Industrial Revolution

The priority target should be the green industrial revolution. It is sweeping a world that has no choice but to address catastrophic climate change. This will change how we live, the appliances we use, the way we travel and fuel our cars, and how we light our homes or power up our computers. China, Germany, Spain and others are rushing to dominate growing markets in solar, wind, fast trains, electric cars and more. This should be the centerpiece of our manufacturing strategy, investing in research and innovation, providing investment incentives, building key infrastructure such as a smart grid. The Apollo Alliance, now merged with the Blue Green Alliance, has a comprehensive energy plan, as well as key initiatives on green manufacturing and transportation, that provides a good roadmap.

•

Rebuild America

This is truly a no-brainer.At current interest rates, America is now being paid to borrow money for seven years. That's right, investors are so spooked they are buying U.S. bonds that pay lower interest than the rate of inflation. For all the ranting of the right, the U.S. now has access to essentially free money.

And we have compelling investments to make that that will have real returns. Our decrepit infrastructure -- from roads to bridges to sewer systems to mass transit -- is not only taxing our competitiveness; it increasingly endangers lives.

Meanwhile, the construction industry is flat on its back. There will never be a better time to finance rebuilding that will eventually have to be paid for.It will cost more later than now. Create a national infrastructure bank, as the president suggests. But go big. Current plans are too timid to take advantage of our current opportunity. These projects will take time to get moving, but we'd be fools to delay a major initiative to rebuild America.

•

Save Our Schools

The president has correctly warned against debilitating cuts in our schools. But across the country, we see the carnage at all levels, from pre-K to college: teachers laid off, after school and advanced placement programs closed, music and arts and languages discontinued. Colleges are raising fees and tuitions, cutting grants, and slashing class offerings.

We need to staunch the layoffs of skilled teachers. But we also should be using the current opportunity to invest in creating the finest public education system in the world, from universal preschool, to modernized public schools, to advanced training and affordable college. Expanded federal revenue sharing with the states in exchange for commitments to sustain state and local investment in schools is an essential first step. Again, these investments will generate a strong return in economic performance and can be financed with essentially free money. Why would we allow an essential key to a prosperous society be savaged when it can be revived now with money investors are paying us to hold?

•

Save Our Homes

As noted nearly one in three homes with a mortgage is underwater. Millions have lost their homes already. Millions more are struggling to sustain mortgages even as their jobs are lost, incomes decline, or higher mortgage interest rates kick in. Housing prices will not stabilize until the massive overhang of foreclosed homes is reduced.

We need a serious program to restructure this debt.

The New Bottom Line has called on the Attorney Generals to require, as part of settling the mortgage fraud negotiations, that banks write off principle and refinance underwater mortgages at current lower rates. They estimate it would pump about $70 billion a year into the economy and create about 1 million private sector jobs. It would cost the banks about half of what the top six paid out in compensation and bonuses last year. Those already facing foreclosure should have access to bankruptcy proceedings that can restructure their debts and, where appropriate, restructure their mortgages, providing them with a right to rent their own homes at market price.

•

Put Veterans and the Young to Work

Veterans are 50 percent more likely to be homeless than other Americans. One in four teenagers is officially unemployed; nearly one in two young African Americans and Latinos is unemployed. We are breaking trust with those who risk their lives for us. We are abandoning the young at the beginning of their work lives. It is hard to think of anything more corrosive to the future of this nation.

If veterans and young people cannot find employment in the private sector, then government should act as the employer of last resort. Rep. Jan Schakowsky has a sensible bill that would provide 2.2 million jobs, largely through direct employment in the public or non-profit sectors. It creates a new Green and Urban Corps and provides resources to nonprofits to hire the young. Work installs discipline and self-confidence. It provides hope. We should insure that every veteran and every young person has that opportunity.

These elements are only the beginning. We'd be wise to raise the minimum wage, and empower workers to insure a greater sharing of corporate profits and productivity. Greater aid to states and localities now in budget straits would also help limit the drag on the economy.

Straight Talk on Deficits and Debt

As we get the economy moving, we need to be clear about how to put our books in order. The U.S. has a real long-term debt concern -- but it is entirely driven by our broken health care system. Comprehensive health care reform is already beginning to create savings, both in Medicare and more broadly. More will require taking on the private insurance and drug companies, and the private hospital complexes that make our costs almost twice per capita those of any other industrial nation.

Fixing health care isn't about "shared sacrifice," or putting a lid on Medicare and Medicaid. It is about getting costs under control, not shifting them to those least able to pay. Empowering Medicare to negotiate bulk discounts on prescription drugs is a no brainer. Creating a public option to compete with oligopolistic private insurers would help. That every other industrial country has manged this challenge suggests just how lame our privatized system is.

And as the economy recovers and people go back to work, our deficits won't be much of a problem -- other than health care costs. But paying for the new commitments above will require progressive taxes and new priorities, ending the wars abroad, reducing our commitment to policing the world, and cutting the Pentagon budget, even as we maintain the strongest military in the world.

Progressive tax reforms are long overdue. As Warren Buffett wrote, he pays a lower tax rate than anyone in his office, including his secretary. We should tax income from wealth at the same rate as income from work, to curb systematic tax avoidance schemes, crack down on offshore tax havens, and on companies parking profit abroad. And as Buffett argued, millionaires and multimillionaires can easily pay a higher tax rate than that now imposed.

The Choice for Americans

All this sounds outlandish. The Tea Party legislators will go nuts. The corporate lobbies will spend so much in opposition it just might boost the economy.

But Americans aren't as stupid as Washington thinks.They understand the economy is in trouble. They are looking not for a short-term boost, but for a long-term strategy. They are appalled at Washington's scorn for their priorities. They want a focus on jobs and reviving America's economic strength. They are upset about deficits largely because they think they are a measure of an economy that is broken. They want Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid protected. They think the banks should help pay for the mess they have made. They want the rich to pay their fair share, and an end to the money politics where predatory corporate lobbies rig the rules to benefit themselves.

The first step is a clear, bold agenda on jobs and American economic revival. It is time to present this to the American people, to introduce it in Congress, and to fight for it all the way through the 2012 elections.

Robert L. Borosage

Robert L. Borosage is the founder and president of the Institute for America’s Future and co-director of its sister organization, the Campaign for America’s Future. The organizations were launched by 100 prominent Americans to develop the policies, message and issue campaigns to help forge an enduring majority for progressive change in America.

Author:

Khanna, Tarun

Publisher:

Harvard Business School,2/08

Format:

HC, 368 pp

China and India are home to one-third of the world's population. And they're undergoing social and economic revolutions that are capturing the best minds--and money--of Western business. In "Billions of Entrepreneurs," Tarun Khanna examines the entrepreneurial forces driving China's and India's trajectories of development. He shows where these trajectories overlap and complement one another--and where they diverge and compete. He also reveals how Western companies can participate in this development. Through intriguing comparisons, the author probes important differences between China and India in areas such as information and transparency, the roles of capital markets and talent, public and private property rights, social constraints on market forces, attitudes toward expatriates abroad and foreigners at home, entrepreneurial and corporate opportunities, and the importance of urban and rural communities. He explains how these differences will influence China's and India's future development, what the two countries can learn from each other, and how they will ultimately reshape business, politics, and society in the world around them. Engaging and incisive, this book is a critical resource for anyone working in China or India or planning to do business in these two countries.

For those interested in a wonderful contemporary account of simultaneous developments in both India and China, this is a must read. All too often there have been too many books that consider these booming economies in isolation. And yet in todays interdependent world, such isolationist accounts provide limited insight on how their astounding growth can best be understood by their growing interconnections with other economies. This novel treatise provides a descriptive and normative account of how both India and China are developing greater linkages with each other that are likely to profoundly reshape the global landscape. In another distinct departure from prior accounts, this book explores not just the economic facets of change but also the political and social dimensions as well. This well researched and accessible book is likely to have broad appeal to a wide range of people that include business executives, public policy decision makers, scholars, and to anyone else that is curious to learn more about these dynamic economies.

A Thousand Cuts

:

Austerity Measures Devastate

Communities

Around The World

WASHINGTON -- In early 2011, Elizabeth Miller, a bus driver for the Port Authority in Pittsburgh, received notice that she would be laid off in 60 days, the victim of austerity measures imposed by the government.

The stress of the looming pink slip caused her Crohn’s disease, an autoimmune disorder that affects the entire digestive tract, to flare up, and she began shedding weight rapidly. Miller lost nearly 30 pounds during her last two months on the job. By the time she clocked out from her final shift in March last year, she weighed just 99 pounds.

"That was the hardest stretch ever because we knew every day that we went to work was another day closer to our layoffs,” Miller said. “I couldn’t retain anything. It was scary.” To alleviate her symptoms, doctors considered giving her a colostomy bag.

But the worst was

still to come.

After losing her job,

Miller lost her savings.

Then she lost her house.

The austerity budget, conservatives' favored response to the Great Recession, is more than just simple belt tightening. It's not one cut or 10, but a thousand. City and neighborhood essentials like bus service become expendable, and things that we have come to depend on as part of our daily lives are slowly erased.

This austerity mindset is taking hold not just in cities and states across the United States, but around the world.

While conservatives have championed austerity as eat-your-peas necessity, these massive cuts often have unintended consequences.

The Huffington Post is launching a series of articles examining the global impact of austerity, from the loss of affordable housing funds in San Francisco to increasing class sizes in New York's public schools, fewer food inspectors in Canada, loss of disability benefits in the United Kingdom, the decimation of France's solar industry and more.

These stories chronicle austerity's collateral damage: the suicide-inducing fear that impending cuts created in the U.K., how one girl's grades suffered when her class size grew, the loss of personnel that made battling fires more dangerous for one New Jersey town.

And When the Last Scholar Has Died...

The cultural industry is on life support. Without money from Big Business, journalism, the arts, and academia are not sustainable. We are witnessing the triumph of economic logic over the world of insight and contemplation.

We're great. No, we're fantastic! Journalism has an important social and political purpose, our magazines and newspapers are necessary household accessories. Yes, we are truly great.

We are smart, too. Our universities are among the world's best. For centuries, German was a prerequisite for scholarly inquiry. One had to speak the language to be able to penetrate the depths of philosophy, theology, or literature. Yes, we are truly smart.

Wrong! We used to be great, maybe. But any private or public body that is connected to the humanities now finds itself on the brink of collapse. Newspapers, magazines, universities, theaters, and even cities and communities require big corporate money to evade bankruptcy: Ad money, sponsorship deals, partnerships with global enterprises. That's not intrinsically bad, but the (fortunate) fact that we can still finance the fruits of our labor through ad sales must not blind us to dire future prospects: We are not able to raise enough money from readers (or theater patrons) to satisfy one of the fundamental rules of sustainable business models: The ability to grow from within. Journalists or artists or scientists rarely generate enough revenue from the sale of their products to finance the growth of their operations. We lack a proper foundation for our business model.

You might respond that culture has always been dependent on subsidies and charitable inclinations. Universities are public bodies because education is considered a societal good and the responsibility of the state. By contrast, newspapers and magazines are private enterprises, and you might say that it is their private nature that somehow sets them apart. But universities, theaters and publishing houses are linked together as one oikos, one habitat. The ideas of the humanities have brought it into existence while media, culture, and science are the vehicles through which we search for answers, provide analyses, offer interpretational models and yield concrete applications for politics or in the economy. The different cogs of the cultural eco-system are inextricably linked, and all of them face the problem of insufficient financial resources.

So let's talk a bit about outside funding

This is not only the case for media companies like "The European" or big newspapers, but also for global brands and cultural institutions. In Berlin, the lack of financial sustainability of the cultural industry has now led to the "BMW Guggenheim Lab": a partnership between a car manufacturer and a cultural think-tank. At a university, such external funding is highly sought after, and professors regularly whisper about those colleagues who are able to attract outside money for their departments.

So let's talk a bit about outside funding. The money comes from a different habitat that is populated by large industrial companies. Our cultural industry would become unsustainable without their sponsorship money -- money that might come from a car manufacturer, or from a big technology company. All the talk about a "service economy" ignores the fact that our economy continues to be driven by those who build cars or washing machines. In contrast to us, they have succeeded in conveying to their customers why their products matter, and why they should pay for them. They are able to generate money from within their own product portfolio and they don't rely on outside funding to prosper and grow. They, in other words, have a real business model.

It's relatively easy to say how much work went into producing a hair dryer. It's much harder to say what it takes to write a good article. How do we measure the costs and value of thirteen years of school, a university degree, study abroad programs, or even a PhD? The difference in measurement parameters is one of the reasons why the typical CV of an engineer looks different from the CV of a journalist.

If you study economics and choose to accept a job offer from a consulting firm upon graduation, you might make 60k or 80k at age 25. Take a job in journalism, and you'll have to settle for 35k -- at most. As a consultant, you can expect regular pay raises as well. In journalism, things look different: You start with moderate pay, but at least your boss tells you that it's possible to freelance on the side, or maybe you can make a bit of money off a speaking engagement. She might even refer you to someone. Talk to them, and you will probably hear that speaking fees have been canceled, but at least a public lecture will look good on your resumé. After a number of lectures and panel discussions (all dutifully entered into the CV), a university might offer a position as a guest lecturer. The dean will tell you: Budgets have been cut, but the institution's name will look good on your resumé, especially if you plan to give public lectures or write books. Yes, a book! That might solve the financial dilemma. You imagine heaps of money -- until the publishing house calls to say that the book proposal sounds terrific, but fees are way down. Fortunately, they say, a book credit helps with the resumé and should eventually lead to a position as a guest lecturer.

What stupidity!

See, it's all connected: Public bodies like universities cannot be fully separated from private companies like publishing houses. Both are linked through the nexus and the logic of the cultural industry. A newly graduated economics student can expect a 100k salary while the humanities major will take home less than half as much.

As a result, we are witnessing a large-scale exodus from one oikos into the other. We are living in a time when the proverbial best and brightest no longer opt to pursue careers in journalism or academia or politics. And we can already foresee a future when the exodus into economics will cease simply because the sphere of culture will have been reduced to insignificance. Apocalyptic rhetoric is fitting here: A cosmic battle is raging between the world of letters and the world of numbers.

In modern Western societies, we have long observed a tendency away from the pursuit of wisdom and contemplation towards those forms of knowledge that can be tackled by natural science. The fight against religious dogma has paradoxically led to the belief that those things that can be described in numerical terms are somehow closer to the ultimate truth than words.

What stupidity!

Of course, words can express truth. Those who argue that only the universalistic appeal of numbers can convey truths fail to see that it has been precisely the cultural context and uniqueness of words -- their embeddedness in the history and fabric of a particular civilization -- which has enabled us to seek answers and raise issues that demand to be named and discussed through speech. As it says in the bible, "in the beginning there was the word."

Speech is closer to our humanness than mathematics.

But during the heyday of modernity, atheism and rationality entered into an unfortunate alliance -- hence the complete absence of any idea of "atheist spiritualism."

To modern science, a whole range of aspects of human existence, from man's inclination towards spiritual beliefs to his temporary indulgence in irrational behavior, appeared as marginal and unimportant. St. Thomas Aquinas still devoted himself to the study of man and metaethics.

Today, our existence is forced through the grid of Excel spreadsheets and expressed as a series of numbers, cleansed of all individuality. I am not surprised that ethical questions usually elicit tired shrugs from computer programmers or consultants or even doctors

:

Many of us have lost the ability to put our thoughts into words and have responded

with apathy.

Above the central entrance to Berlin's Humboldt University, we can find a Latin motto: Nutrimentum Spiritus, "nourishment for the mind." A few kilometers away, the newspaper "Der Tagesspiegel" has given itself the credo Rerum Cognoscere Causas, "to know the causes of things."

And when the last humanities scholar has died, only then will we realize

The author of a new book on the subject tells us what inspired his involvement

in the Occupy movement and how a leaderless revolution could work

The Leaderless Revolution explains why our government institutions are inadequate to the task of solving major problems and offers a set of steps we can take to create lasting and workable solutions ourselves.

In taking these steps, we can not only reclaim the control we have lost, but also a sense of meaning and community so elusive in the current circumstance. In a day and age when things feel bleak and beyond our control, this powerful and personal book will revive one's sense of hope that a better, more just and equitable order lies within our reach-if only we are willing to grasp it.

There are few books that attempt to interpret the world and how it is run.

The Leaderless Revolution offers a refreshing and potent contrast to the Panglossian optimism of Tom Friedman's The World is Flat but, like that book, it offers a way of understanding the world of the 21st century that is both clear and easily comprehensible.

Carne Ross takes different angles on contemporary issues

- economics, politics, the state of democracy, the environment and terrorism -

wrapping them into a unified explanation of how money and power

function to control the lives of the earth's inhabitants, such that they feel powerless

to affect their collective future.

It seems that mankind has settled upon liberal democracy as the ideal form of government. Its triumph with the collapse of communism signalled the end of ideological struggle and thus of history. The Leaderless Revolution will show however that even in democracies, many if not most of the population feel that they are excluded from any agency over the issues that most trouble them, while governments appear less and less able to influence the global problems that threaten our peace and comforts. Mining the rich but little-examined histories of both cosmopolitanism and anarchism, The Leaderless Revolution shows how both ideas, in combination, are relevant and necessary for the problems of today.

Not only an antidote to our global crises; Carne Ross offers, moreover, a route to fulfillment and self-realisation.

Occupy Wall Street

and

a New Politics for a Disorderly World

Carne Ross | February 7, 2012

As Kuhn’s theory might suggest, the rank contradictions of the current political-economic paradigm—gross inequality and massive environmental destruction—are so great that a new paradigm should emerge: a system of thought and method of political action that can address these ills, and indeed offer a better method of organizing and understanding human society.

As a diplomat in the British foreign service, I served deep inside one bastion of conventional politics—the world of international diplomacy. I helped propagate “top-down,” government-dominated politics across the world, including in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo. I resigned because my government ignored available alternatives to violence and dissembled before the Iraq invasion (I had been Britain’s Iraq expert at the UN Security Council). This breach triggered a deeper questioning of the way things are done. I concluded that top-down management was not working and that conventional political models, including representative democracy, were producing not stability but its opposite, an increasingly fractured society at home and around the globe and a perilously vulnerable environment.

In my former career, I saw how governments attempt to enforce order on a world that resists their methods. But complex systems, such as a world of billions of dynamic connections, cannot be frozen as if on a chessboard, intelligible and susceptible to step-by-step command and control. Indeed, governments by their own admission are less and less able to control the massive, heterogeneous forces now making our world: dramatic economic transformation, mass migration and climatic change.

Worse, and this helps explain the failure, these attempts exclude the people most affected—ordinary people. It has become clear that even in our supposedly iconic democracies, government decisions do not reflect the needs of everyone but rather those who enjoy privileged access: large corporations, the superwealthy, the elites—the 1 percent who benefit from this disorder, like the speculators who play volatile markets, companies that profit from the absence of price on environmental destruction and the cynical politicians who exploit the growing anxiety and disaffection with crude and atavistic certainties.

* * *

A new politics is needed, and in the early weeks of Occupy Wall Street, I saw signs of its emergence. Some would see the Occupy protests as yet more evidence of disorder, not its solution. But to my jaded eye, the beacons pointing to a better method were bright indeed. At the UN Security Council and other diplomatic forums, I had taken part in high-stakes negotiations on everything from Iraqi WMDs to Palestine to the future of the Balkans. But the experience of hundreds of people listening to the voice of one—anyone!—through the “people’s mic” moved me more than any of those worldly negotiations. This was a politics of the many, included at last, at least in the small square of Zuccotti Park, if not in our distant capitals. Here I saw true respect, not the pretend respect of diplomacy. Here I saw involving and passionate debate, not the childish antagonism of Internet debate or the partisan rancor of Washington. The crowd was gripped by an unfamiliar emotion, a shared sentiment that others were listening and that their decisions truly mattered.

This is the start of a new politics, but obviously mere meetings and protest marches are not enough. There is nothing certain about the future, save that it is our actions that will create it and that others are already exploiting our inaction. It is no longer sufficient to appeal to government to put things right; a corrupted system will not reform itself. We must create new systems, new modes of decision-making and interaction, and new forms of economic behavior to replace the old.

Occupy Wall Street demonstrated some of the necessary elements of this new politics. Anyone who wished to participate could do so. All had a voice in decisions. These are the features of “participatory democracy,” which, when practiced more broadly, delivers outcomes unfamiliar from our own corrupted democracy: equality (because the interests of all are accounted for); transparency (and thus less corruption); and a civic culture of respect, not ugly partisanship.

This is a politics of the many for the many, rather than that of a small clique of elected representatives, co-opted by the powerful few. It requires patience and work, as the Occupiers of Zuccotti Park have learned. The consensus principle is vital, and prevents the “tyranny of the majority,” but it must (and can) be engineered to allow fast decisions and discussions of complex issues. In Porto Alegre, Brazil, mass participation in decision-making has succeeded in deliberating the affairs of a city, and the results clearly indicate more equal provision of services, better environmental protection and an improved political culture, one that is open, nonpartisan and uncorrupted.

Once decisions are made this way, they have immense force. Unlike with the distant machinations of government, all participants feel that they have been consulted. Everyone commits.

Participatory democracy should be promoted for every public setting, from our neighborhoods to our cities and counties. As turkeys will not vote for Thanksgiving, politicians are unlikely to institute such systems. Instead, we will have to set them up ourselves, starting local—our street, our building, our school—and in doing so establish legitimacy from the ground up, a legitimacy that today’s politicians evidently do not enjoy.

* * *

The second element is equally critical: this is the politics of the personal. Our political goals must be embodied in everything we do, for this is the most direct way to produce necessary and urgent change. Despite its perpetual encouragement by over-promising politicians, the habit of asking government to produce the ends we seek is out-of-date. Given the way that Washington (and indeed London or Paris) works, there is zero chance that any politician, even one with the best intentions, will deliver a just society, where the weakest are properly cared for and where the earth that sustains us is itself sustained.

Personal action is also the most effective means of influencing others. Forget Internet petitions, tweeting, writing to your Congressman or other formats of usually fruitless complaint—what you do will have the most persuasive force in encouraging others to do the same. Think of “the wave” in a sports stadium. This is the way to change a complex, highly interconnected system, not top-down management, as network theory and social research are demonstrating. And throughout, an older maxim carries an eternal message: the means are the ends, as Gandhi taught. If you use violence, you are likely to get violence. Like his famous Salt March (or Salt Satyagraha), the ideal political protest is the one that embodies the change you wish to see. Do it yourself, and nonviolently.

Self-organized, nonviolent action by the many, consulting all those affected: some would call these methods anarchism, but if so it is a very gentle kind. In fact, these techniques amount to a politics of modernity, of complexity, a politics most appropriate to our current state. These methods also inhere in a new economics, for Marx was in this sense correct: the economics makes the politics. You cannot have a fair, cohesive or happy society when a tiny few hold the vast bulk of the wealth and where companies are legally bound to maximize profits over all else, ignoring any un-costed effects to the environment or society.

There are forms of business that in their very design make up a better politics. Cooperatives share ownership among their staff as well as agency—that sense of control and participation that contemporary society denies us. As Britain’s massive retail giant John Lewis has shown, cooperative companies can be just as successful, and can endure much longer, than the merely profit-driven. “Triple bottom line” companies give equal weight to their social and environmental impacts alongside the profit line.

Such companies can be founded. They can be competitive. And we can support them by choosing them over more negligent businesses. In the OWS Alternative Banking working group, for example, we are building the elements of a new Occupy Bank [see Carne Ross, “Revolution Through Banking?” TheNation.com, December 22], which would be democratic, transparent and egalitarian, and would offer better services than for-profit banks.

* * *

Finally, it’s not just a better political system or a better economy that the new paradigm promises; it is also a richer aesthetics, a better culture. The ghastly homogenization and banality of consumer culture undermine our experience of life (this is perhaps the reason for the weird idol worship of the aberrational design fetishist Steve Jobs). The rabbit-hutch geography of the office combines with the humiliations of corporate culture (for bosses as much as the bossed-about) to alienate and demoralize everyone concerned. How we crave escape—pharmacological, alcoholic or virtual.

The current malaise is thus existential as well as political and economic. Nonetheless, this collective crisis can be captured in one word: agency. Control. We have lost it. We need to take it back.

The methods proposed here flow from an appreciation of society and the human project that differs fundamentally from the assumptions that underpin conventional neoclassical economics and representative democracy. The premise is that people are not merely self-serving but value other qualities—compassion, meaning, community, beauty—at least as much. That they can be trusted to run their own affairs, a trust that is repeatedly undermined in today’s fear-based culture. Hobbes’s “state of nature,” of war of all against all, is a bogeyman belied by real-life experience, which suggests that after disaster strikes, people facing common hardship collaborate without need for overweening authority, as Rebecca Solnit has eloquently written. Human nature is more beautiful than we have been led to believe.

But perhaps because the human is a rather subtle and undefinable beast, these methods, and this new understanding, may never make up a complete new system or structure, in theory or in practice. Marxism and neoclassical economics sought comprehensive explanatory systems of society and indeed of human behavior. Both in their ways proposed complete accounts of the human project, with all loose ends neatly tied off.

But if 1989 marked the end of communism, the global financial crisis and the insistent drumbeat of environmental disaster should mark the end of the political and economic orthodoxy that brought these perils about. The presumption of completeness inherent in both these thought-systems was their downfall because, inevitably, they left out crucial factors.

Marx failed to foresee that totalitarianism was an intrinsic risk of a self-appointed vanguard movement. The rationalist models of neoclassical economics failed to take account of the influence of irrational human behavior, like that witnessed in the credit bubble’s credulity, as well as the revealingly named “externalities” like social and environmental costs. Unpredicted and unmanaged economic volatility, mounting social fragmentation and grave environmental damage are now overwhelming the appealing but simplistic “internal” logic of equilibrium-seeking markets and utility-maximizing consumers.

Indeed, the pathetic human need for a complete explanatory system needs to be resisted, for no theory can offer a full account of a world that is already massively, and yet also increasingly, complex, where any event, from the destruction of a job to war, is the subject of countless factors, all in constant, dynamic interaction. We hunger for a detailed map of the world, but the best we can hope for is a general understanding of a new dispensation: complexity. And complexity does not demand management by authorities; it is instead best influenced by individual agents, acting by themselves at first, then with others, carrying the potential to affect the whole system.

This, then, is the new politics for a disorderly world. The defenders of the status quo claim that only their methods can maintain order. They are, in fact, achieving the opposite. The politics proposed here, and already evident in Occupy and elsewhere, can foment a deeper order, where people are connected to one another, reweaving our tattered social fabric, where work is fulfilling and responsible, and where everyone in society is given their proper voice and their interests are accounted for. Our current political and economic forms have made avowal of these ideals seem archaic, almost absurd. How ridiculous to wish for such virtues! We cannot let such cynicism triumph. A new way is possible, but it has to be enacted, not asked for.

The global financial crisis has provoked a profound and necessary questioning of the prevailing political and economic orthodoxy. So pervasive is this disillusionment with the current order that it is hard to find anyone prepared to defend it. Disorder is the new order; disequilibrium rules, and old assumptions no longer hold.

Down With Leadership

Posted: 02/ 2/2012 2:42 pm

The Republican primaries grind on. Now that Newt Gingrich has declared his determination to fight it out until the convention in August, the year’s news “agenda” will be wholly dominated by the soap-opera arguments of the presidential contest. Though tediously drawn-out, the ritualized debates reveal little of how the successful candidate will really perform once in office. But one message comes through, unintentionally, loud and clear. Our political culture, and indeed society, is obsessed with the idea of “leadership.” This obsession is not only demeaning (both to the candidates, and to us); it is profoundly dangerous.

Our culture fetishizes leadership. A thousand books extol the “leadership lessons” of tycoons and sportsmen. The leaders are wise; the rest are rendered impotent sheep. As the deification of the leader and his superhuman qualities reaches its orgiastic climax in the presidential election, it seems almost blasphemous to point out an awkward new reality. The king is shedding his clothes. Leadership, at least of the traditional political kind, is not working.

The nature of the world today is dramatically altered from the circumstance of only a few years ago. Globalization is spawning an immense and growing complexity, requiring new forms of management. It is simply impossible for any single authority to understand or arbitrate this maelstrom. Yet this omniscience is what we demand of our leaders.

Any event, from recession or war to the creation of a single job, is now the function of countless myriad and ever-changing factors. This always was the case, but now it is more so. Nevertheless, like children looking up at teacher, our infantile political culture requires the would-be leader to claim that they alone can make wise decisions to govern this extraordinary complexity. The gameshow format of the campaign debates (which tells its own story) only highlights the absurdity: “In 30 seconds, please tell us how you would save the economy?”

The evidence of the disastrous ineffectiveness of top-down “leader-led” management of the world is all around, should we care to see it. In the environment, climate change accelerates. In the economy, volatility mounts untrammeled by the confused and belated efforts of governments, forever behind the curve. In society, inequality and social tension are in parallel ascent.

Traditionally, and with easy resentment, we blame politicians and political parties for these failures. But the uncomfortable truth is they are not the problem. The problem is in fact us, for in our pathetic obeisance to the leadership cult we have abdicated not only our own responsibility, but, worse, our much greater power to deal with today’s new world.

In a complex system, the most potent agent of change is not authority but the individual, and the group. The era of a world organized and dominated by states and their leaders is ending. No one will take their place in the director’s chair. No single agency or leader will determine any particular event, or necessarily understand it. An era of leaderless change is upon us, where history will be written by the many, not the few.

This shift is buttressed by recent research in network theory: Complex systems resist centralized command-and-control, but individuals can trigger change across the system. Other research highlights another under-rated vector of change — those with most influence upon the behavior of others are not government, not experts, but those right beside us: neighbors, family and peers.

Conventional assumptions about political power are thus overturned. It is action by individuals, and with others, which offers the most effect. As we realize the decline of the leader-based model, a new form of self-organized politics will emerge.

Rather than looking to distant authority for answers, individuals and groups will pursue change directly through their own behavior, for the means, as Gandhi taught, are the ends. To arbitrate our common business, people are starting to negotiate directly and horizontally. In cities around the world, participatory democracy, where all can take part in decision-making, is producing fairer, less corrupt and more sustainable outcomes. Decisions made through mass participation reflect the interests of everyone and not just those with privileged connection to the leadership.

Watching the trading of hollow slogans in the debates, we intuitively know that the leader-centric model is not working. Taking responsibility instead ourselves will demand more work. But action by us is not only more effective, it is also more fulfilling than the cynicism and frustration evoked by today’s leader-obsessed political culture.

Worshipping leaders is more than usually dangerous in today’s new complex circumstance, but this cult has long denied our own remarkable power.

A new paradigm of political change

:
The political methods of the 20th century are, it appears, less and less effective for the world of the 21st.

The nature of globalization is without precedent: accelerating interconnectedness, with billions of people interacting constantly in a massive, dynamic, and barely comprehensible process.

Yet the assumption persists that the political processes and institutions designed in the 20th century, or earlier, remain appropriate and effective in this profoundly different state of affairs. In fact it appears that the ability of national governments and international authorities to manage the severe problems arising from this new dispensation are declining, despite their claims to the contrary.

Take climate change. The annual climate summit has just ended in Durban, after dozens of “preparatory” meetings and thousands of diplomatic discussions. Its output was a decision to agree a treaty in 2015 to introduce emissions limits in 2020. Oddly, many governments (and commentators) are claiming this as some kind of victory.

It is traditional to blame individual states (the US, China) for the failure to agree to more robust measures, and these do bear some responsibility. It is however also apparent that the process itself is the problem, and has been since its inception. The negotiation echoes traditional models of state-based interaction. Governments treat it as a bargaining process, where commitments to curb emissions have to be matched by other countries. The net result is that nothing is done.

The correct measure of Durban is not the declarations of success by the participating governments, which are required to trumpet their own effectiveness and negotiating prowess. The only output that matters is the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere. This has grown with unprecedented rapidity by more than 10% since the first such conference, the so-called “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.

Effects in the real world should be the test of such processes, and indeed of all political methods, including government’s. By this measure, efforts to curb financial volatility or terrorism have been similarly ineffective. Experts say that the internationally-agreed Basel III rules to reduce risky banking practice are insufficient, and they are already being watered down by banks’ lobbying. Ten years after 9/11, and despite the killing of Osama bin Laden, we find ourselves in a condition of never-ending threat, multiple conflicts and the seemingly permanent embrace of an intrusive and hugely expensive security state.

There is a more pernicious consequence of the repetitive but tenuous claims to effectiveness made by the practitioners of conventional politics and government: everyone else is dulled into stupefied inaction. If “the authorities” claim to be on top of these problems, what does it matter what we do? And here’s the rub. We have been pummeled into a kind of dazed apathy, endlessly badgered by politicians that they can fix it, when in fact we are the most potent agents of change.

At home, democracy has been subverted. Corporations donate copiously to both parties to insure their influence. Politicians initiate legislation in order to extract rents from big business. Private prison owners lobby for longer sentences. There are now lobbying organizations representing the interests of lobbyists.

This legal corruption is deeply entrenched in our supposedly democratic political system, resisting all attempts at reform. It is naïve to expect decisions from this system to reflect the interests of ordinary people. And this is what we see: tax regimes that tax incomes of the poor more than the accumulating wealth of the rich; healthcare legislation whose primary beneficiary is the healthcare industry; a comprehensive failure to regulate the banking industry to prevent further violent crises such as the ‘08 credit crunch.

Cynical despair would be a perfectly understandable response to this dismal picture. But this reaction entirely suits those who profit from the status quo. Instead, this analysis leads to one clear prerogative: there is no choice but to act ourselves. If we are not to stand by while the world’s problems deepen, there is only one alternative: action based upon on our convictions, uniting with others for greatest effect. And as we shall see in the next post, such action is in fact far more powerful than any other method of politics in effecting real and lasting change.

A former diplomat, Carne Ross is the author of The Leaderless Revolution: how ordinary people will take power and change politics in the 21st century, published by Blue Rider Press (Penguin), ebook now available, hardcover to be published in January 2012. For further information and videos explaining the book, visit www.theleaderlessrevolution.com.

This is the first in a series of four posts.

Non-violent, non-sectarian, non-ideological,

leaderless revolution by ordinary people

“The American power structure has been set reeling by something that is simply outside the boundaries of their mental universe: a non-violent, non-sectarian, non-ideological, leaderless revolution by ordinary people.”

For a few days, the imperial gang thought they had turned the tide — and their stenographers in the mainstream media followed suit. The protests in Egypt were running out of gas, we were told; now the power players were coming to the fore, in Washington and Cairo, to take charge of the situation and move things along — slowly, moderately — down a path of gradual reform and stability.

Newspapers ran pictures of the “nearly empty” Tahrir Square, sometimes in tandem with pictures of last week’s massive crowds. We saw shots of Egyptians “getting back to normal life” — going to the bank, shopping for shoes, crossing the street in suit, tie and briefcase on the way to the office. Attention was turned to the “moderate” figure who had taken the reins in Cairo, the dictator-appointed security chief Omar Suleiman. He was strongly backed by the Obama Administration as just the kind of steady, moderate hand we needed to make judicious concessions to the opposition without allowing the country to slip beyond the control of Washington’s foreign policy agenda. The general line among the imperial courtiers and their media sycophants was that the uprising had reached its peak and was now receding.

It was all a lie, part of the remarkably witless self-delusion that has afflicted the Washington-Cairo power structure from the beginning of the uprising: the illusion that they are still in control of events, that they can tinker a bit here, recalibrate a bit there, and still end up with the same system of elite domination and corruption basically in place.

But what we did see on Tuesday? The false reality painted for us by our betters simply melted away, and Cairo saw perhaps the largest protest yet, as hundreds of thousands of people filled Tahrir Square — including multitudes who were joining the uprising for the first time. Thousands more were gathering in front of the Parliament building in what the Guardian rightly called “a second front” of the uprising. And the Cairo crowds were joined by thousands massing in Alexandria, Suez and other cities across the nation.

This was the answer of the Egyptian people to the limp package of worthless, stalling “concessions” cobbled together by the Nobel Peace Laureate in Washington and his proxy torturer in Egypt. The reply to the regime was simple, powerful, concise: “We want our freedom. You must go.”

And oh, how that stung Washington’s new lordling! Suleiman immediately resorted to the same bluster we have heard from America’s henchmen since time out of mind. He put it plainly: “There will be no ending of the regime.” He railed against the “presence of protestors in Tahrir Square and some satellite stations insulting Egypt and belittling it” — obviously a reference to al-Jazeera — and declared: “We can’t put up with this for a long time.” And he sounded the time-honored “more in sorrow than in anger” note of all two-bit tyrants, saying that he hoped the protests would end because “we don’t want to deal with Egyptian society with police tools.”

This is pretty rich coming from the man who has been directly in charge of doing just that to Egyptian society for many years. The only way the corrupt regime has kept itself in power is by “dealing with Egyptian society with police tools.”

These be your gods, O Progressives! This is the man your champion had championed to “manage” the “transition” in Egypt from the dead hand of a discredited dictator to a backroom string-puller lacquered with a new coat of PR. Of course, when word of Suleiman’s private temper tantrum leaked out, the Obama Administration began to backpedal on the firm support for Suleiman it had shown earlier in the day (which had come complete with a long phone call from Suleiman’s long-time friend, Joe Biden). Now, the White House was troubled by these “unhelpful” remarks. Unhelpful indeed — for they gave the game away too soon. Wrong-footed by this unforeseen outpouring of popular will, Washington has not been able to cobble together a proper storyline to justify a violent crackdown by the regime.

The American power structure has been set reeling by something that is simply outside the boundaries of their mental universe: a non-violent, non-sectarian, non-ideological, leaderless revolution by ordinary people. Our power structuralists know only one thing: violent domination. Since that is what they seek to impose, they believe that anyone who opposes them must seek the same. They cannot conceive of anything different. They don’t know how to react to such an incomprehensible event. There’s no one to demonize. There are no armed groups to flex their muscles against — or to make a cynical deal with, if necessary. (Violent dominationists of every stripe have much in common; they know each other’s minds, they can often come to terms, if only temporarily — like Hitler and Stalin, or Reagan and Saddam.) The poltroons on the Potomac are dumbstruck as they look at these crowds of people who have freed themselves, who just walked out into the streets and claimed their human freedom — on their own, individual by individual, with no “authority”, no leader, no armies to “grant” them what is already theirs by their birthright, our birthright, on this our common planet.

It is now past midnight as I write. This has been a great day in Egypt — a day when truth tore through the lies and made fools of the killers, thieves and torturers trying to impose their cankered will on free people. May we see more such great days ahead — in Egypt and around the world.

The Leaderless Revolution,

Part 2: The Action of One

2011 will be remembered perhaps above all for the extraordinary wave of revolutions across North Africa and the Middle East. They were triggered by the self-immolation a year ago this week of one man in Tunisia, Mohamed Bouazizi. It was an appalling act, but one of such devastating conviction that it inspired millions.

Our own politics has been in recent weeks illustrated by the banal spectacle of the Republican presidential debates. It could not offer a more hollow and passionless contrast. Whether the resemblance to The X-Factor is deliberate or subconscious, the public admission of the utter artificiality and boredom of contemporary politics could not be more conspicuous. The contest is dull because we already know who has the real power behind the scenes, and it's not us.

Like the "color" revolutions that overthrew repressive regimes in Ukraine and Georgia, the Arab Spring revolts had one goal: the removal of the oppressor, replacing autocracy with democracy. The object of the revolution was singular.

Those seeking fundamental change in western democracies face a different and more confusing situation. The lines of good and evil are not so clearly drawn, although they undoubtedly exist. We enjoy pluralism, freedom of speech, and democracy, at least in name and form, if not actual effect. The problems of today cannot be singularized, as dictatorship can. Mounting inequality, climate change, and the ultimate emptiness of much of modern life may be pernicious and potentially devastating problems, but they are also complex and resistant to simple remedy.

The causes of these ills are multiple but closely connected. The reckless pursuit of profit above all else is sustained by political institutions, and electoral process, that have been more or less completely, if often covertly, subverted by money and corporate influence. Remarkably, everyone seems to know this. We pretend to believe that our democracy works, even when we know that it doesn't.

The enemy that must be conquered is not a dictator, both easily identified and caricatured. It is both less blatant and more sophisticated. It is not one, but many. This means that a revolution to change things fundamentally for the better will not look like the Arab Spring. Protest alone will not dislodge the deeply entrenched forces that maintain an iniquitous status quo.

Indeed, protest in some ways helps legitimize this subtly but deeply unjust system, for it reinforces the pretense that the system is responsive to popular discontent. The bankers of Wall Street may secretly welcome "Occupy Wall Street" because one of its cultural effects is to remind the broader public that, unlike Egypt, America is, at least ostensibly, a free and democratic country. The subterranean reality however is that it is neither of these things, as the plutocrats are well aware. Both wealth and legislation are controlled by a tiny minority, and for their benefit.

This is a complex beast to fight, and it must be fought on many fronts and in many ways. This battle will not be won by marches on Washington, but by myriad small but substantive changes wrought by individuals and groups acting upon, as well as declaring, their convictions (for not only systemic change is needed, but also cultural). This revolution does not need a manifesto, or leaders. It can be, and perhaps needs to be, a leaderless revolution: a million acts of change, driven by individual conviction.

These acts might be to set up or give preference to new forms of economic organization, like cooperative companies that, owned by their workers, give weight to other values, social and environmental, as much as profit, but without sacrificing competitiveness. In one Occupy Wall Street working group we are seeking to establish a bank that by its very nature -- transparent, accessible, democratic -- will inject these values into the nervous system of the economy, and thus society (and offer better services than the for-profit banks, to boot).

But these multiple acts of change must also inhabit the simple choices of the everyday: what we buy and where we bank, and how we treat others -- celebrating the compassionate, shaming the greedy. And though simple, the decision to enact our beliefs in every circumstance is profound and liberating, not least because this is harder than it sounds. Dull, it is not.

The many steps towards a just and sustainable economy, and a truly inclusive democracy will be taken not by those we vote for, or petition. They will not emerge from the inevitable dialectic of history either. These steps require action and choices by us, individually, and then together. And here is one similarity of this revolution to the Arab Spring. Like the act of Mohamed Bouazizi, it can only start with one person, and that is us.

A gorgeously written book, in parts staggeringly superficial, yet championing a truth that might transform the world.

In lazer sharp prose, Ross illuminates the importance and relevance to our current world of several ancient truths:

*Actions speak louder than worlds.
*The individual does have the power to effect meaningful change.
*Participatory democracy can be strangely beautiful to experience, and giving regular folk the agency to take political decisions can be a highly effective way to solve local problems.

Ross aruges that if we are to make the world a better place, we as individuals need to physically engage with problems, as opposed to merely supporting good causes by donations and signing e-petitions.

Despite the books stellar qualities, Im only awarding 4 stars, as I fear theres a chance the work will have a net negative effect. So obviously sincere, this book may bewitch good natured people into effectively joining with free marketeers in their battle to minimize the benevolent (and tax raising) power of the state.

Similar to Le Carre who also served as a diplomat, Ross openly admits he's still traumatized by the harmful actions he participated in and witnessed on behalf of the state.

There's two token sentences saying many of those in public service are good people, but over half the book is relating stories showing the corruption and impotence of politicians, civil servants, journalists, NGOs, multilaterals and most of all the state. Ross even goes as far as to invent a half baked theory suggesting that even with the best of intentions its often impossible for the state and the current system of internal diplomacy to produce good outcomes, due to various supposed inherent contradictions. My own experience is that the folk involved in public service are, on average, far more generous, honorable and honest than most in the private sector where Ive spent most of my career.

Ross's own NGO , Independent Diplomat, has a great track record and he obviously has outstanding operational skills. But when it comes to offering an overall explanation of how the world works, a graduate student with good instincts good do far better. A few examples of the authors specific mistakes.

Early on Ross suggests that free market dogma is beginning to be used to offer moral justification for the suffering of others. In fact its been like this right from the start. When Smith laid the ground work for our modern conception of capitalism, he was practicing moral science. All the decent morality was lost under the baleful influence of Ricardo and others as they refined Smiths theories in raw free market dogma. So much so that as early as the 1840s, the free market rag "the Economist" opposed intervening to help the millions starving to death in the Irish potato famine, on the moral grounds that we'd be "interfering with the laws of nature."

Later on in the book Ross unequivocally states that opening ones countries to the imports of another is a good thing. Im not sure displaced workers thrown onto the scrapheap would agree. To support his extraordinary claim he cites that contemptible mouthpiece of the superclass , "the Economist".

Overall Ross gives the impression that in the last few years its only in a handful of cases that authorities have undertook effective efforts against poverty and mass violence. In fact there have been thousands of such cases, often involving the state, NGOs, mulitarals and local communities working in partnership. The excellent, freely available "2011 World Development Report" is a good source to find out whats been going on.

A better solution to the worlds problems is not to weaken the state in favour of anarchism as Ross wants, but to do the opposite, while also ensuring individual agency is protected and encouraged. A far, far superior new book on this is "The Courageous State" by Richard Murphy. In the 1950s and 60s, States in the developed and much of the developing world were successful not only in paying back the massive war debts, but also in reducing inequality and keeping unemployment very low (nicely under 1 million in Britain). They were guided by the principles of Lord Keynes, a man who wanted an active state but also recognized the value of decentralization and engagement.

Having said all that, I still recommend this book; I've never read a stronger case for the importance of personal engagement and the value of agency for all.

Saturday, 23 January 2016

5 Bold Predictions For The Future Of Higher Education

Everything from the emergence of MOOCs to new learning styles and mounting financial and sustainability pressures are impacting the education landscape. Every day higher education leaders are developing new strategies to leverage across these developing challenges and opportunities.

The common denominator amidst all this change: students. What should they learn? How can institutions best attract them? How do you best empower their learning? How do you keep them safe? What do they value? These aren’t new questions but the answers are shifting rapidly. The questions are also becoming more critical for our educational institutions given the National Center for Education Statistics report revealing in 2012, for the first time in three decades, demographics predicted a diminishing population for college age students in the United States.

The University of Utah’s Lassonde Entrepreneur Institute will unite 412 residences with a 20,000-square-foot “garage” space for students to gather, build prototypes, and launch companies.Here are five bold predictions for how the answers to those questions will define the future of education.

Current models--reliant upon departmental space where curriculum is developed and fostered independent of the university at large--must change. Today’s students demand cross-disciplinary learning and thinking, particularly in science, engineering, and technology. This cross-disciplinary learning demand is manifesting itself in buildings that seek to be academies of tomorrow and entrepreneurial hubs focused on bringing business and creative minds together. Colleges and universities need to think about how these space changes serve as curriculum drivers.

Examples of this can be found in our project at the University of Utah where they are developing a transformative entrepreneurial building where students can create, live and “launch” companies all in the same space. Elsewhere, we worked with the University at Buffalo partnered with Kaleida Health to create a one-of-a-kind facility that brings their academic research center into the same building as a global vascular institute. Incubator spaces within this building extend beyond the notion of “fusion” and empower students to utilize design thinking as a means to create solutions, solve problems and make jobs not take jobs.

Amidst the ongoing discussion relative to online education over the past few years, it is important to remember higher education institutions don’t need to choose between online learning and traditional learning--they need to find the right balance. Recent research shows a fifth of Chief Academic Officers (CAOs) don’t feel online education is strongly represented in their institutions’ long-term strategies, even though they believe it should be. At the same time, new statistics also reveal that while distance education has been growing at a faster rate than traditional higher education ever since 2003, that rate of growth is beginning to slow.

The truth is neither education delivery model is intrinsically better than the other. Universities need to strategically balance both platforms and also think about how they support the never-ending, 24/7 nature of today’s learning that extends beyond the classroom. Institutions that begin to best leverage an appropriate balance can make better use of time in the classroom and also define tailored approaches to how the professor, student and material work together across the platforms.

The University at Buffalo entered into an innovative partnership with Kaleida Health, resulting in a building that stacks their clinical translational research center above Kaleida’s Global Vascular Institute. Credit: Tim WIlkes

To best recruit and retain students, universities need to evaluate how they offer a student life experience that prepares students to be healthy and dynamic people in the future. That means universities need to embrace sustainability and wellness as key components to campus life. Spelman College recently differentiated itself by diverting all of its athletic funding to create a “Wellness Revolution,” focused on best promoting the health of its students.

Scores of other universities are realizing students value their life experience just as much as their academic experience. This is pushing universities to find creative ways to fund new spaces and programming for students. The key here is strategically providing students with key resources that give them more opportunity to make the most of their collegiate life experience.

Today’s students aren’t just bringing their own technology devices to the classroom, they’re also bringing them to the student center, the gym and the dining hall. This increased use places greater demands on a campus IT infrastructure. Universities seeking to solve today’s challenges will need to respond with robust access and bandwidth upgrades. At the same time, institutions needs to respond to the “mobility shift” which allows educators and students to be nimble and engaged from anywhere.

Additionally, the education community needs to think about how the emergence of augmented reality devices from Google Glass to Oculus will transform campuses. These devices bring powerful questions related to how they enable students and teachers to maximize the educational experience. Moreover, all of the thinking relative to technology investments needs to also consider security--as the cyber security attack at the University of Maryland earlier this year revealed, universities need to balance empowering students with keeping them safe.

The historic practice of providing funding to state institutions based on enrollment is already shifting to performance-based models. These models will redirect educational priorities and investment to help more students succeed while also redefining an institution’s responsibility to its students and its community. While the performance model discussions are more apparent for the state–funded institutions, their impact may extend further as it pertains to incubation, research and corporate support. Already, these systems are gaining momentum and leaders need to be highly involved with their build-out.

There’s no magic button to press to ensure education institutions success in the future. But, those seeking to differentiate themselves and best attract and empower students need to think about these issues and react immediately.

that there’s NOT that scope to cut.

Michelle Meyer,

senior economist

at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

Many economic sectors don’t have much more room to fall

.
A significant factor behind recessions are shifts in demand for major, long-lasting purchases, such as automobiles, furniture and household appliances. In the last recession, sales of those durable goods fell 13 percent, and consumption of nondurable goods — food and clothing, for example — fell less than 4 percent.
.
In the corporate sector, meanwhile, executives say they’re deeply worried by the turmoil in the financial markets. But businesses have adjusted in the past few years in ways that make them less likely to undertake the kind of mass layoffs that were widespread in 2008 and 2009.
.
“Since the onset of the recession, companies have been focused on improving their balance sheets, deleveraging, and increasing productivity,” said Tom McGee, managing partner of Deloitte Growth Enterprise Services, which surveys chief executives of mid-size companies nationwide to gauge the outlook. “We’re not seeing signs that there are mass workforce reductions on the way.”
.
Moreover, the corporate sector’s financial situation is by many measures stronger than it was before the last recession, meaning companies are less likely to be forced to cut workers to stave off bankruptcy. Non-financial U.S. businesses have $15 trillion in cash or investments that could easily be converted to cash on their books, up from $13.7 trillion in 2007.

.
“The economy is not primed for a recession in the sense that before you fall into recession, there’s usually a lot of excess, which means if you have a shock, businesses respond quickly by slashing inventories and cutting workforce and investment,” said Michelle Meyer, a senior economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. “But they’re running so lean right now that there’s not that scope to cut.”

Monday, 5 October 2015

We're living on fumes in this country, and the pursuit of happiness has come to an end for millions of families!

Main Street is still suffering. But, the market is on Viagra, shored up by QE2, the Fed program to buy hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. Treasury Bonds. As QE2 winds down, and the economy falters, the discussion turns to the possibility of QE3.

A tremendous number of band-aids have been administered to keep the U.S. economy from hemorrhaging; to prevent not only a domestic collapse, but a global one.

Each attempt to divert a financial disaster has had varying levels of success; many failing to achieve their intended goals.

Why have we needed so much stimulus?

To understand the economic dilemma this nation faces -- and what we have to overcome -- we must first understand how we got here.

Without going back too many years, most of our current economic morass was set in motion 30 years ago and has been compounded over the years by inept political leaders.

Americans are paying the price for overspending, underfunding, over regulating, under regulating, misplaced assistance, disproportionate taxation, misuse of funds, ill-conceived campaign financing, and political deceit.

But most Americans are unaware of the number and scope of the stimulus programs, or what affect they've had on the the recovery that we're so desperate for.

Each has caused considerable economic damage, all requiring some form of stimulus to avoid a complete financial meltdown.

When we mention stimulus two programs immediately come to mind, TARP (Toxic Asset Relief Program) and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Both are assessed with varying levels of equivocacy. But there are far more stimulus programs than these two -- some familiar, some hidden, some secret and potentially criminal.

Together they amount to trillions of dollars.

Republicans raged over the auto bailouts from TARP funds yet elicited not a whimper over the criminal AIG $64 billion money laundering scheme that benefitted Goldman Sachs and 8 other banks. Goldman alone received $12.9 billion from taxpayers through TARP.

The problem is, money for TARP was diverted from its intended purpose, used, instead, to save the banks sorry asses, AIG, and GMAC. The Fed then secretly purchased the $1.3 trillion of the banks' toxic assets, which TARP was created for. They're still holding those toxic securities because the banks cannot afford to repurchase them.

ARRA has been praised by some and vilified by others depending on their desired outcome. Like it or hate it we need honest discourse about its effectiveness.

An honest assessment would show that it clearly saved the economy from falling off the cliff and anyone who doesn't acknowledge that is either blind or lying. It saved jobs and prevented even greater unemployment. Without it unemployment would be over 12% -- killing any hope of recovery. Without it, states and municipalities would have already defaulted.

But, it would also be honest to acknowledge that parts of the program failed -- some miserably. Some because they were misdirected, some misused, and some blocked by uncaring congressmen. But it is also obvious stimulus was needed because of an abject failure of the private sector forcing the need for government assistance.

To be brutally honest, most of the crises we've experienced can be directly attributed to Republicans and their policies. Years of right-wing policies and deregulation have created this unprecedented need for economic bailouts and stimuli.

Republican Phil Gramm, his right-wing colleagues, complicit Democrats, and Bill Clinton created the banking crisis in 1999, which we experienced nearly a decade later. Gramm and Republicans caused Enron and WorldCom in 2000. These legislative failures created the need for TARP.

But there are many other programs that have helped mask an inevitable economic collapse.

The Fed's covert loans, exposed by Bloomberg's lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act, and brought to the attention of the American people by Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Ron Paul, shows some despicable -- potentially criminal -- actions in the program including loans to Muammar Gaddafi totaling more than $26 billion. The President's Housing Affordable Modification Program, designed to help homeowners, was pretty much a failure and has done little to stabilize the housing market. The FDIC's loss-share program is a fire-storm waiting to explode and the Treasury's $300 billion guarantee to Citibank is a hidden time-bomb that falsely supports over-priced Citi stock.

There are subsidies to oil companies and agriculture corporations, and other equally destructive giveaways.

But none of the stimulus programs have been more corrosive than the giant tax scam of the 21st century -- the Bush tax cuts!

Sold by Republicans as a way to stimulate the economy and create jobs, the only thing it has done is transfer $2.5 trillion dollars from hard-working middle-class Americans to some of the greediest Americans in history!

They continue to push a failed deficit creating tax policy and corporate giveaways -- which are actually stimulus programs for the rich and corporations -- while threatening to cut programs for 98% of the nation's citizens; cuts that will cause greater unemployment, increase the strain on American families and an already stretched economy, and cause a depression-esque collapse.

It's time the American people woke up and confronted Republican lawmakers holding them accountable for the pain they've inflicted on this country.

There's not much time before our markets collapse, followed by the implosion of world economies; a gift from the right-wing corporatists.

The Hollow Economy

A great post on Jon Taplin’s Blog i’s well worth the read. In it he points out some of the current administrations delusions of joblessness (look at the chart!), and other political stagnations that are affecting our current state of economic affairs.

One of the major points of his post is how our economy has shifted to a service base, which is largely non-exportable (at least to smaller, more locally oriented businesses). This also means we’re not manufacturing as much as we used to, and therefore don’t have the export power we’ve had in the past. In other words, as the dollar has fallen against the Euro and other currencies, we’ve not seen an increase in exported manufactured goods as you’d expect.

This is an extremely important point to take in. If the current administration can’t see that the single most important thing we need to do in order to help the economy is to save/rejuvenate manufacturing jobs (read as: jobs that create exportable products and services) in the US, then we’re really sunk.

I tend to think, however, that the market will correct for this. We’ve already heard of some manufacturers moving operations to the US from the EU as a means to cut manufacturing costs. This is a trend that will probably continue, but only if businesses wake up to the fact that the current downturn in the economy isn’t a short term anomaly. Rather, it’s a long term (think several years) condition.

The unemployment challenge is so great that we must be more creative and willing to try anything that is reasonable, including the following.

"Everybody talks about the weather," said Charles Dudley Warner, "but nobody does anything about it." These days everybody complains about unemployment, but nobody does anything about it.

To be sure, some people offer suggestions. Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) proposes the Bring Jobs Back to America Act, which would organize a new strategy to rebuild manufacturing, possibly including new tax breaks for companies that return jobs to the U.S.

The President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, chaired by GE's Jeffrey Immelt, suggests training workers through partnerships at community colleges, cutting red tape to speed creation of jobs, boosting travel and tourism by easing the visa process, offering more help to small business owners and putting jobless construction workers to work on energy projects.

As has been emphasized by the Manufacturing Institute, our schools are not preparing people for jobs in the real world. One of the biggest challenges to job creation is the skills deficit. To compound that problem, workers are losing mobility -- at least partly because of the housing collapse. If your mortgage is under water -- and almost a fourth of them are -- you cannot pack up and move to a job somewhere else. In the 1950s, one in five Americans moved every year; now it's one in 10.

But the unemployment challenge is so great -- 16 million people -- we must be more creative and willing to try anything that is reasonable, including the following:

Offer visas to would-be immigrants who can provide assurance they can and will create new jobs. Many creative people around the world would love to bring their talents here, but getting in has become almost impossible.

Invite U.S. companies to repatriate foreign earnings without being taxed provided they use it for U.S.-based production and job creation.

Create a national infrastructure bank and fund it with budget reform that would create a capital budget.

Enact the pending Free Trade Agreements with Panama, Colombia and South Korea. They mean billions more in exports -- and many thousands of new jobs.

Use a portion of the funds now being spent on unemployment compensation to subsidize private sector job creation. After six months of unemployment compensation, transform it into a voucher system for private sector firms to create jobs.

Expand and make permanent the R&D tax credit. The one great strength we have in international competition is our creativeness. Let's build on our strength.

I bet you have your own ideas for job creation. Share them with me and I'll pass them along.

Wednesday, 30 September 2015

Every culture attempts to create a �universe of discourse� for its members, a way in which people can interpret their experience and convey it to one another.Without a common system of codifying sensations, life would be absurd and all efforts to share meaning would be doomed to failure.�Dean Barnlund � �Communication In a Global Village�

The All-Pervading Influence of Culture

: Culture As A Mindset

Culture As A Mindset

It�s a given that culture powerfully influences thoughts, emotions and behaviors.In fact, culture operates at primary cognitive, perceptual and motivational levels.Culture is an important part of our blueprint for operation within our physical and social worlds.We are an insecure species and culture offers us a reduction of anxiety through its standard rules of thought, emotion and behavior.Culture offers predictability in an often unpredictable world.We see things through a cultural lens that tints, magnifies, shrinks and otherwise shapes our perceptions.Our culture is a mindset that we developed during childhood socialization.The structural integrity, coherency and stability of our personalities are rooted in our culture.It is for these and other reasons that intercultural interactions can cause anxiety and arouse emotions.When people of different cultures meet there can be uncertainty and confusion about the rules of interaction.Many of our basic assumptions do not work.Our normally successful thoughts, emotions and behaviors do not get the verification and feedback we are accustomed to.Some of our expectancies regarding the outcome and meaning of social interactions are disconfirmed.When we are in a social interaction situation in another culture we may think, feel or behave in the manner we are normally accustomed to in such a situation and then find that it just didn�t work.We expected to be understood and we expected a certain response from other people, but we either got no response at all or a response that was completely different from what we expected.We might have been so misunderstood that we caused hurt feelings, anger or resentment or felt these ourselves.And even if we don�t experience these stronger emotions, we most definitely feel confusion.

The concepts of low-context and high-context are useful analytical tools here.Context refers to the amount of meaning which the social situation has on the rules of discourse for an interaction, in other words, the way in which the social situation influences the structure and content of the interaction.America is a low-context culture (more informal) and Pacific island cultures are high-context (more formal).As an American from a low-context, individualistic culture, when I meet someone for the first time my inclination is to be informal and also to tell them a lot about myself and ask them a lot of questions about themselves in order to get a maximum amount of information in a minimum amount of time.To a Pacific islander, who comes from a high-context collectivist culture, I may appear pushy by moving too fast, self-centered and egotistical by telling them so many things about myself, and lastly I may appear rude and prying by asking them so many questions about themselves and putting them on the spot.

Culture also influences how we learn and how we teach.Teaching within one�s own culture is an activity where social and cultural context and the existence of different thinking, learning and instructional styles interact in a very complex fashion.The classroom is a complex sociocultural environment even when working within our own culture.The age, sex, gender role expectations, appearance and dress expectations, numerous other role expectations, socioeconomic status and many other characteristics of both students and teachers are all variables affecting the interactions, the effectiveness of instruction and the amount of learning which takes place in the classroom.The situation becomes even more complex when students and instructors are from different cultures.Culture and sub-culture affects the attitudes, assumptions, expectations, style and performance of both instructors and students.Consider America where there are differences between rural and urban subcultures as well as differences within and between European, African-American, Hispanic and Asian subcultures.In the Pacific we also encounter cultural and subcultural differences within and between indigenous people and immigrant populations; and even among indigenous people there are ethnic and cultural subdivisions such as main islanders and outer islanders with implications for interaction.Culture influences norms of verbal and non-verbal interaction within the classroom.Even within the United States, subcultural and socioeconomic differences can create vastly different classroom interaction patterns.A society�s educational processes normally display a vast array of thinking styles, learning styles, teaching styles and styles of learning environment. Culture can contribute to making certain styles more prominent than others.

Communication does not take place in a vacuum.All communication takes place in a social setting or environment.We call this the context because the setting is never neutral; it always has some impact on how the participants behave.The classroom environment is one of these settings that specifically influences intercultural interaction.The rules, assumptions, values, customs, practices, and procedures of a given culture strongly affect the conduct of classroom activity.�Larry Samovar & Richard Porter --Intercultural Communications: A Reader

Human behavior takes place in a social and cultural context that varies widely from place to place.This variation occurs along certain dimensions that are signified by social science terminology that we use in cross-cultural psychology.�Segall, Dasen, Berry, Poortinga, Human Behavior in Global Perspective

How To Improve Cross-Cultural Communications

When you live and work in another culture and actively strive to develop cross-cultural understanding and allow yourself to adjust to the culture, you make fundamental changes in the way you think, feel and behave.We can refer to this as informal on-the-job training and it can be very effective.For many people an informal approach may be all that is needed for them to quickly adjust to another culture.Success with an informal approach to cross-cultural self-training depends on the personality, knowledge and experiences of the individual.Formal training programs in cross-cultural communications also bring about the changes in people that are necessary for them to interact cross-culturally.Perhaps one of the most effective ways to bring about cross-cultural understanding and intercultural interaction skills is to combine both language and cultural training in an intensive program of instruction.The study of language is a considerable aid to cross-cultural understanding because embedded in a people�s language is their cultural logic and their rules of social interaction.Most languages have built-in ways to talk to people of different social statuses. The Japanese language is a prime example and Pacific island languages also contain linguistic conventions such as the respect speech and oratory found in Pohnpei, Fiji and Samoa.

The Peace Corps Approach To Cross-Cultural Training

A combination of intensive language training and cultural immersion living is the approach taken by the U.S. Peace Corps in its training programs for Peace Corps Volunteers throughout the world.In-country Peace Corps training programs typically last about 8 weeks and consist of intensive language and culture training as well as orientation and training in the field that the volunteer will be working in.The language and culture trainers are often well-educated locals, many times educators, who have a good understanding of American culture and its influence on the behavior of Americans.They also very often have an objective anthropological understanding of their own culture and its influence on themselves and their own people.Peace Corps training programs are intensive; there is normally about three hours of language training in the morning with cultural and job-related sessions in the afternoon.Peace Corps trainers use a lot of role-playing activities where volunteers must use both language and culturally-correct social interaction skills.In addition to this formal training, volunteer trainees also explore the local culture informally in their off-hours and on weekends and try out some of their language and social interaction skills.Some training programs also combine village and home-stays with locals as part of the training process.During my own Peace Corps training in Fiji we spent one week in a rural Fijian village, each volunteer staying with a separate family.The families were instructed not to speak any English to us and we were encouraged to try to speak as little English as possible to each other.This was immersion training at its best.At the end of a day we found ourselves starved to speak English, but forced to communicate in the local language.It was a very effective cross-cultural and linguistic training regime and everyone in my group went on to become successful volunteers, except for one.

Most Peace Corps Volunteers have the correct attitude for successful cross-cultural communication that allows changes to take place in them.However, there are always a few who do not possess the right attitude and who sometimes terminate even before the training is over.A few others may not make it through the first year and will also go home.And then there is sometimes even a few who must be �psycho-vacced� (psychological evacuation) because of acute culture shock.In my training group in Fiji there was only one volunteer that had to be psycho-vacced during the 8th month our two-year stay.She had classic culture-shock symptoms.While at work as a nurse in the hospital she was fine because she was always busy on the ward.But when off duty she spent an excessive amount of time alone at home reading novels and sleeping.And when she did socialize with fellow volunteers she would become overly happy and histrionic and end of laughing herself sometimes to the point of tears and sobbing.She was physically and psychologically assessed by a doctor and it was determined that it would be best for her to return home.She left Fiji in a good frame of mind.She had done a fine job while working as a nurse in the hospital, but she accepted the fact that she just wasn�t cut out for long-term overseas assignments.

However, the overwhelming majority of Peace Corps Volunteers are successful because it�s what they signed up for in the first place.There was one guy in our training group who wanted a very rigorous Peace Corps experience and felt that Fiji was too developed and comfortable for him.At the end of training he took an option of getting reassigned before the final swearing-in ceremony and ended up in Nepal.There is a lot of truth in the Peace Corps recruiting slogan that says�it�s the toughest job you�ll ever love.�It is psychologically demanding, even grueling sometimes with regard to cross-cultural adjustment requirements, but is also immensely challenging and rewarding with regard to the character building and personal enrichment and achievement aspects of it.Some volunteers even become significantly resocialized into the local culture and coupled with fluency in the language these are the volunteers who are said to have �gone local.�They are usually very successful volunteers and also the ones who are most remembered by the local people after they return home � if they ever return home.But �going local� is not a necessary requirement for a completely successful Peace Corps experience.

Not all expatriates take overseas jobs for enriching cross-cultural experience and hardships.Becoming bicultural or bilingual is not in everyone�s job description and neither is it always a prerequisite for being a success overseas, but it obviously helps.Today most multinational businesses provide cross-cultural and language training for employees who will be stationed overseas, and the U.S. Foreign Service, a pioneer in this field, has developed this type of training to a fine science.

Effects of Cross-Culturalization

People who become cross-culturalized through informal or formal training will undergo some very fundamental changes in their thoughts, emotions and behaviors due to the neural rewiring which takes place in their brain and the changes in the way they process information.Our thought processes become more sophisticated and complex as we factor new cultural norms into our daily lives. We build new neural networks and alter existing ones, and we construct new and more complex cognitive maps with these networks.We learn to naturally for multiple points- of- view and more possible explanations for the thoughts, emotions and behaviors of the people we interact with.We engage less in simplistic cultural - stereotyping and gradually develop the ability to see through the cultural lenses of the local people.We also learn that it is wise to suspend judgment sometimes and admit that we are not yet ready to understand something about the host-country people.We gradually learn to tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty and to more patiently wait for insight and understanding to come. We learn to understand and control our ethnocentrism and the ways in which our own culture influences us.

Changes in our thoughts and emotions eventually lead to behaviors that can either be successful or unsuccessful while living in another culture.A consistent production of unsuccessful behaviors is normally an indication of culture shock.Symptoms of culture-shock include negative stereotyping, excessive criticism of host country people and their ways, anger and resentment, depression, sullenness and withdrawal.People experience stress when they can�t successfully communicate with other people or make themselves understood by them.It can be emotionally demanding to always be unsure of how people will think, feel and behave.Each day can bring disconfirmed expectancies and linguistic communication difficulties and it can sometimes be cognitively and emotionally exhausting for a person just to get through an average working day.Successful cross-cultural communications allows one to be at ease in the host culture and form real friendships and working relationship with the local people.

Culture Shock � Causes & Symptoms

Contemporary research in the areas of neural, perceptual, cognitive and evolutionary psychology support the idea that we operate within and upon our physical and social environments by way of evolved and hardwired neural-circuits which guide our species-typical behavior at a macro level.In addition to these are the more plastic neural networks and resulting neuro-perceptual-cognitive maps that allow us flexibility and adaptive variability.Large numbers or bundles of these species-typical content-specific neural-circuits are what allow for the great problem solving abilities of the human mind and the species-variability of behavior in response to environmental differences.These patterns of responses we call culture.Species-variable cognitive maps are both physical networks of neurons in our brains as well as informational networks of content accumulated and defined by sociocultural experiences and stored as memory.These cognitive maps operate at both the individual and collective levels, and people who share a culture also share aspects of the collective cognitive map.

Both the physical neural networks and the informational content of these culturally influenced networks are somewhat flexible due to our neural plasticity and can and do change and adapt through experience and learning and through both conscious and unconscious effort.But our tendency is to rely on these networks or mental maps in a relatively consistent and stable manner, unless forced to change in order to adapt.These networks provide proven and somewhat predetermined maps for us to use in the processing of information from our sociocultural and physical environments.They are more than just memory and they allow our brains to negotiate our environments without having to reinvent responses all the time.Once these neural networks and cognitive maps are laid down and used for many years they become somewhat difficult to change and require considerable effort to do so.A mismatch between our neuro-perceptual-cognitive maps and our physical and sociocultural environments can therefore cause considerable uncertainty, confusion, insecurity and anxiety.The complex of thought, emotion and behavior caused by this mismatch is called culture shock.

Culture shock is the term used to denote the anxiety and stress reactions that some people experience when they live in a cultural and linguistic environment that is significantly different from their own.The anxiety, stress and resulting thoughts, emotions and behaviors are caused by cognitive dissonance and uncertainty due to disconfirmed expectancies and ego-identity diminishment.Cognitive dissonance (uneasiness) occurs when people�s cognitions about themselves and the world around them are inconsistent with one another.The disconfirmed expectancies that we experience when living in a different culture contribute to this cognitive dissonance and to uncertainty, insecurity, anxiety and stress.In addition, individuals also experience anxiety and stress due to ego-identity diminishment.Our identities are rooted in our home culture and its particular physical and sociocultural environment.When we leave that particular complex of sociocultural and physical environmental factors we also leave the roots that support and nourish our personalities.

Frustration, anxiety and stress also occur whenever people can�t do all the things they are accustomed to doing in their everyday lives.These can include work, home and leisure related activities that they are either no longer able to do at all or no longer able to do like they are accustomed to.For example, sometimes because of differences in transportation services people cannot move around as freely or as widely as they are accustomed to.When I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Fiji we were not allowed to own or rent cars and had to ride only buses and taxis.When I first moved to American Samoa, Palau and Pohnpei I was always without a car for a while until I could find a suitable one at a good price.My family and I had to do a lot of walking and riding in taxis.For things like grocery shopping, getting to work and getting the kids to school on time, not having a car can be quite an inconvenience, particularly for Americans so accustomed to ease of movement via a personal automobile.Taxi drivers can also be undependable.You can call a taxi company and they will tell you that a car is on the way but it may arrive much too late for your needs, or after it picks you up it may drive around picking up other customers for a while, and sometimes it never arrives at all.In Fiji there are a lot of taxis and buses and transportation is pretty good and fares low.In Samoa it's good to negotiate the fare with taxis right up front or risk an occasional unreasonable fare.In Palau all taxis have standard fares posted for customers to see thereby removing potential confusion and conflict.In Pohnpei the number of cars rapidly increased in the late 1990�s and today there are many taxis with reasonable fares and the prices of automobiles have also gone down considerably.

In addition to transportation constraints, if a person from a large continental urban society moves to a small island society they may experience a sense of social and spatial claustrophobia, more so than someone who is from a rural or small town society.Pacific islands come in many different sizes, from large islands like the main islands of New Caledonia, Samoa, Fiji and Hawaii, to very small atolls in Micronesia that you could almost throw a stone across.To a person from a large continental urban society, even the larger Pacific islands can seem quite small.On the open highways of the United States a person can drive for hours and days on end across the spacious plains, deserts and mountains.On Pacific islands there is no such driving experiences to be found.On the other hand, the Pacific does offer weeks and months of sailing across its vast expanses in ships and boats as well as ocean exploration through diving.

Another source of considerable distress for some people is not being able to eat the foods they are accustomed to.Anyone who wants to live and work overseas should be prepared to make considerable changes in their diet and get accustomed to the local foods and the sometimes limited selection of familiar foods in the stores and restaurants.They may not have the nice variety of very large and well-stocked grocery stores they had back home or the many choices of restaurants and fast-food places.Fiji and Samoa have an abundant variety of foods which can be found in public markets, restaurants, shops and fast-food stores while Pohnpei and other parts of Micronesia are more limited in the types of food you will find on a regular basis.Palau has a good variety of foods and restaurants due to its tourism industry.American Samoa is somewhere in between Fiji and Pohnpei with regard to variety of foods.Fiji has had a McDonalds for several years and one recently opened in American Samoa, while Palau can boast of a Winchell�s Donuts.

When living overseas in a place where the people speak a different language it can be difficult to make yourself understood even in relatively simple but important areas of life such as shopping and getting around town.It can be frustrating trying to ask for something in a store, to pay and receive change, and to try to tell the taxi driver where you are going.Sometimes you are certain that people understand you but are just pretending that they don�t, and other times they make a very considerable effort to communicate with you regardless of their authentic English language limitations. In most parts of the Pacific, however, people speak pretty good English and basic communication is not a big problem. Fiji, the Solomon Islands and Samoa speak British-Australian-New Zealand-style English, while American-style English is spoken in American Samoa and Micronesia. French is spoken in New Caledonia, French Polynesia and part of Vanuatu.

And lastly is the issue of values.A person can experience considerable stress and anxiety when they are living in a different culture with different values from their own.A person may find that some of their own cherished and deeply held values and assumptions about life may not be equally important to members of their new host culture.The areas of religion, moral behavior, justice and fair play, racial equality, work ethic and privacy are areas where there may a great deal of cultural relativism, and people living and working overseas need to learn to deal with these differences in a relaxed and nonjudgmental way.Throughout the Pacific, you will generally find that islanders have stronger family values than is the norm back in U.S. urban settings.

One area of Pacific island culture that some people have a particularly hard time adjusting to is privacy � in Pacific island societies there is sometimes none, or at least very little of it.These are oral cultures where people pass the time of day or night telling stories about the people, places, things and ideas encountered during their day.Gossiping is a favorite pastime for Pacific islanders and everybody knows a lot about many other peoples� sayings and doings.Gossip plays a large social control function and manages to keep people at least publicly in line.To do something completely out of the public eye is possible but requires considerable cleverness.Gossip is important in all societies, in fact it is a robust human universal and is considered by some paleolinguists and anthropologists to be one of the major reasons why humans began to speak in the first place.Gossip transmits important information about peoples� behavior and moral character and hence its prominent social control function.Gossip also binds people together socially because you must normally be at least partly accepted into a person�s in-group before they will share valuable tidbits of gossip with you.

And the list of potential causes of culture shock could go on.A productive exercise for someone living and working abroad is to regularly explore cross-cultural stress points between their own culture and that of their hosts in order to bring these areas of cultural conflict more into the open where they can be acknowledged and more objectively analyzed and dealt with.

The specific symptoms that emerge from the stress and anxiety of culture shock include depression and withdrawal, negative stereotyping of the local people, excessive criticism of them, excessive socioemotional dependence upon fellow foreign nationals and expatriates like themselves, and the inability to form socioemotional relationships with members of the host culture.Other symptoms include escapist behavior such as excessive sleeping, a solitary immersion in reading books or other solitary activities, an all-consuming desire for news from home, daydreaming about foods from home and alcohol and drug abuse.

Culture shock can be prevented by striving to become more culturally relativistic and flexible in your thinking and behavior, by developing a real enthusiasm for learning about the host culture and by forming real intercultural relationships.Successful cross-cultural communications is a fairly straightforward proposition.With the correct attitude, a few good cultural informants, a few cross-cultural communications concepts and some time spent as a participant-observer, a person will quite naturally develop a repertoire of intercultural interaction skills.And, when a person begins to move further along the continuum of cross-cultural understanding and interaction, they will more quickly put down ego-identity roots in the new host culture and feel more at ease with themselves and their surroundings.They will become more happy and productive at work, at home or while moving about within the society at large.They will no longer be negatively affected by disconfirmed expectancies.They will understand more and be understood more by others.In short, they will have become bicultural individuals.

What Is Really Happening in Athens

The Greek Parlement's vote, during the night of Sunday to Monday, on the austerity plan the European Union demanded as a prerequisite to the release of a new installment of financial assistance was inevitable. Clearly, the alternative to the austerity plan was, in the short term, exclusion from the eurozone, leading to bankruptcy and the consequent plunge into a state of poverty even more unbearable than what the country faces today. And one finally understands that the negligence of successive governments in Athens for the past 30 years -- their demagoguery, their clientelism, their bad faith, and their short-sighted policies -- have forced their partners to raise their voices.

Nonetheless.

In an affair like this one, which is political as much as economic, and where the highly inflammable matter being toyed with is a people, their pride, their memory, their revolt, their survival, one would like to have seen things handled more deftly.

In such a declaration by German or French leaders, a tone free of contempt, less like a diktat, would have been appreciated. One would have preferred that they not contemplate the replacement of the Greek finance minister by a European commission, the very idea of which could only be perceived as a useless form of humiliation. More importantly, one would have wished that the bureaucrats responsible for the plan not throw health expenditures in with the indispensable and just measures for drastic reduction, placing them on the same level as the wasteful spending of a state given to excess. In other words, we would like to be sure that those charged with evaluating the country to save it from bankruptcy had no other choice but to make cuts blindly, reducing the budget for the most essential public services, those upon which the bio-political survival of its citizens depend, as much as, say, defense.

At the same time, we should be certain that these evaluators are themselves adequately informed of the diabolically complex mechanism that they are implementing by compelling Greece to reimburse its new debt while facing the growth that this new bludgeoning will automatically cause to contract, and that its effect will not be to bring the country to the level of debt in 2020 that it faced in 2009, before the "bailout."

In any event, it is regrettable that this crisis is not the occasion, not only in Greece but throughout Europe, for a vast democratic debate, whose results might be: 1) an actual auditing of this debt, so that the electorate has the right to know its history and how it spiralled (incidentally, isn't this the only way to make them a part of the implementation of the plan that, for the moment, is imposed upon them?); 2) a division of responsibility among governments (socialist as well as conservative), bankers (including those who have been recycled to head international institutions and who, all of a sudden, are wagging their fingers at the Greeks), and local social categories (who have turned fiscal fraud into an art form, and continue to do so); or 3) the vision not of the choice but of the choices that were available and remain so to this society gripped in a stranglehold (choice, yes, this deliberation by citizens among a variety of possibilities, even if reduced, that is the essence of democracy as invented, precisely, by the Greeks, and from which no state of emergency can exempt those who govern).

All that is not a question of style but of substance, and even of destiny, first of all because the images transmitted from Athens are not those of simple demonstrations but of a social tie that is disintegrating, exploding, dissolving -- and it's like the end of a world; and then because, if the people are not always right, one is never right when against the people -- except in resignation to its hurling itself into one or another form of this naked abhorrence, with neither words nor faith, this strange, suicidal whirling of passions that are dead and, paradoxically, all the more virulent, which is the eternal refuge of worn-out societies indifferent to the form of chaos they choose or, in reaction to chaos, to that of their chosen tyranny; and finally because the entire continent finds itself confronting this politically, morally, and metaphysically unbearable perspective. Europe had, among other virtues (including peace and prosperity), that of reconciling with the practice of freedom peoples, both to the south and to the east, who had been more or less deprived of it for a long while. And now the same institutions, the same community rules, the same currency -- in short, the same Europe -- would have the inverse effect, because it would plunge a member country into anarchy, or into forced order, a dictatorship, even fascism -- which amounts to the same thing.
.
This would be a failure whose shock waves, really, would far surpass those of the simple rupture of an economic and monetary union. And for the "good Europeans" whom Nietzsche predicted would be the only ones to hold back the flood of nihilism, when the time came, this would be a nearly unimaginable yet very real irony of History. But the worst is never certain. And there is still a little time to save, together, the dream of our illustrious pioneers.

Back to the Drachma

:

Time to Let Greece Be Greece

Thus spoke one European finance official this weekend, as one more confab of ministers from the eurohood gathered to assure the world that all is proceeding apace toward "a more balanced monetary union governance model and effective firewalls."

The tendency to speak in finance jargon--one is reminded of the incomprehensible utterances of Alan Greenspan--may suggest to some that they have the problem under control. However, the lack of frank discussion of the underlying issues suggests instead that they have a tiger by the tail and are making it up as they go along.

Each week now brings new assurances that a deal is imminent, and yet as the weeks go by it is becoming harder and harder to imagine that after all of the complex negotiations, the end will not be more straightforward

: Greece defaults and exits the eurozone.

It may be inevitable, and it may be for the best.

Maybe not for Germany, maybe not for the banks, but for Greece.

The United States began as poorly structured fiscal union. The debts of the nation and the debts of the states were comingled and the boundaries of responsibility poorly defined. Like Europe, the United States is a federation with a single currency and centralized monetary policy, but with fiscal authority retained at the state level. And early on, there were periods of fiscal crisis that were first resolved with the federal government assuming the debts of the states. But it was only after state defaults on their own debts that long-term stability was achieved, as new working rules--established under state constitutions--were established that clearly delineated the responsibilities of the states and of the central government.

Europe--or more precisely the eurozone--was created with similar failures to define boundaries of responsibility.

It is not surprising that nations bound together with a common currency, but each retaining spending authority, would find themselves subject to fiscal pressure. This problem was exacerbated by the implied debt guarantees that allowed each state to borrow freely, while giving the banks and other investors little incentive to make credit decisions reflective of each country's management of its fiscal affairs.

The European experience mirrors the experience of nations that have pegged their currency to the dollar. There are benefits of maintaining a common currency, but the peg cannot be sustained if a nation fails to manage their affairs--such as was the case of Argentina--or if they outperform the nation to which they have pegged their currency--such as Taiwan and Singapore. In either cases, market forces will exert pressure over time to move away from the peg and allow their currency to depreciate or appreciate until a new balance is achieved.

Greece is the Argentina of Europe, and enjoyed the benefits that access to a common currency offered, until it was no longer able to pay its bills. Argentina finally defaulted a decade ago, but not before its families of means squirreled their pesos away in dollars stashed in foreign banks--much as Greeks are doing today.

There was no impediment to Argentina's ultimate default. The currency market did for Argentina all of those things that are being demanded of Greece today. Everything was adjusted downward in real terms. Salaries and pensions--public sector and private alike--funding public services. The population became poorer, their futures cast into doubt, but unlike Greece, no public official had to cast a ballot.

Each week, the Germans--along with their junior partners in France--are putting the hammer to the Greeks. Cut public sector spending. Cut worker salaries. Cut pensions. Sell the airports and trains. And this week demands to cut private sector salaries by 25%. Now, German ministers have taken the final, inevitable step and suggested that Greece must have a fiscal overlord to set budgets and spending levels.

While the world has focused on Greece's failures--with the implication that it was German beneficence that allowed Greek participation in the euro in the first place--it is easy to lose sight of the fact that Germany has been the greatest beneficiary of the creation of the eurozone. The advent of the common currency eurozone with 330 million people created a massive, captive market for the German export machine.

After China and ahead of the United States, Germany is the second largest exporting nation on earth, and the bulk of what it sells is to other European countries.

There are no innocents in this morality tale.

All those Greek bonds and Italian bonds and Spanish bonds and other bonds that are now at risk were issued to sustain an economic bubble of consumerism from which German exporters were among the largest beneficiaries. If Greece lied on its application for admission, the Germans had good reason to look the other way.

Those who have benefited from the euro want it to survive this crisis.

Failure is not an option--insisted European Central Bank member this weekend. It is not an option for Germany, whose currency would skyrocket if the eurozone nations went their separate ways, punishing its export-dependent economy. It is not an option for France, for whom the euro is the key both to containing the German colossus with which it has fought several wars and to creating a counterweight to U.S. global power and prestige. It is not an option for China, that badly needs an alternative currency to the dollar for its massive foreign currency holdings.

And then there are the financial imperatives of achieving an orderly unwinding of the exposure of the European banks to Greek default risk. Each week, we are assured, a deal to restructure Greek debt--theoretically averting a default--is almost done. The parameters of such a deal are not in question. The banks holding Greek bonds would write off more than half of the value of their bonds against their fictitious capital reserves--fictitious because those reserves have been invested in sovereign euro-denominated bonds, among which are these very same Greek bonds. Hedge funds will be strong-armed into accepting the same deal, though their write-offs will be against their own--rather than other people's--money.

But essential to the suggested resolution would be the forbearance by the ISDA--the International Swap Dealers Association--in pronouncing that no "credit event" has taken place, such that those same banks will not have to pay out on credit event losses as the sellers of credit default swaps against those same Greek bonds. Such an outcome would seem to be unlikely based on the merits, but in a world that has dangerously comingled the financial and the political, anything is possible.

For all of this--to sustain the illusions that are Europe and the stability of its banks--all that is asked of Greece is that it voluntary cede its powers of democracy and self-determination.Yes, Greeks can still elect their leaders, but those leaders will no longer control the destiny of the nation.

But even if a default by Greece on its March 20th bond payment is diverted, nothing will actually have been solved. At best, a new package of loans will be arranged, and the default will be delayed until some later date.

This solution is backwards. Instead of affirming Greece's responsibility for its own choices, it will have been stripped of its sovereignty. Instead of having to face up to the challenge of building its own future with real rules--as ultimately each nation must--it will move forward instead as a vassal state to its Franco-German overlords.

Perhaps it is time to gather those ministers and elected leaders into a room and tell them to go home.

For all of their sakes, perhaps it is time that they open their eyes and let Greece be Greece.

Better now than later, because all is not proceeding according to plan.

Because there is no plan. They are just making it up as they go along.

Back to the Drachma: Time to Let Greece Be Greece

"The pace and composition of the deleveraging process needs to be consistent with the macroeconomic scenario of the adjustment program and should not jeopardize the provision of adequate levels of credit to the economy."

Thus spoke one European finance official this weekend, as one more confab of ministers from the eurohood gathered to assure the world that all is proceeding apace toward "a more balanced monetary union governance model and effective firewalls."

The tendency to speak in finance jargon--one is reminded of the incomprehensible utterances of Alan Greenspan--may suggest to some that they have the problem under control. However, the lack of frank discussion of the underlying issues suggests instead that they have a tiger by the tail and are making it up as they go along.

Each week now brings new assurances that a deal is imminent, and yet as the weeks go by it is becoming harder and harder to imagine that after all of the complex negotiations, the end will not be more straightforward: Greece defaults and exits the eurozone.

It may be inevitable, and it may be for the best. Maybe not for Germany, maybe not for the banks, but for Greece.

The United States began as poorly structured fiscal union. The debts of the nation and the debts of the states were comingled and the boundaries of responsibility poorly defined. Like Europe, the United States is a federation with a single currency and centralized monetary policy, but with fiscal authority retained at the state level. And early on, there were periods of fiscal crisis that were first resolved with the federal government assuming the debts of the states. But it was only after state defaults on their own debts that long-term stability was achieved, as new working rules--established under state constitutions--were established that clearly delineated the responsibilities of the states and of the central government.

Europe--or more precisely the eurozone--was created with similar failures to define boundaries of responsibility. It is not surprising that nations bound together with a common currency, but each retaining spending authority, would find themselves subject to fiscal pressure. This problem was exacerbated by the implied debt guarantees that allowed each state to borrow freely, while giving the banks and other investors little incentive to make credit decisions reflective of each country's management of its fiscal affairs.

The European experience mirrors the experience of nations that have pegged their currency to the dollar. There are benefits of maintaining a common currency, but the peg cannot be sustained if a nation fails to manage their affairs--such as was the case of Argentina--or if they outperform the nation to which they have pegged their currency--such as Taiwan and Singapore. In either cases, market forces will exert pressure over time to move away from the peg and allow their currency to depreciate or appreciate until a new balance is achieved.

Greece is the Argentina of Europe, and enjoyed the benefits that access to a common currency offered, until it was no longer able to pay its bills. Argentina finally defaulted a decade ago, but not before its families of means squirreled their pesos away in dollars stashed in foreign banks--much as Greeks are doing today.

There was no impediment to Argentina's ultimate default. The currency market did for Argentina all of those things that are being demanded of Greece today. Everything was adjusted downward in real terms. Salaries and pensions--public sector and private alike--funding public services. The population became poorer, their futures cast into doubt, but unlike Greece, no public official had to cast a ballot.

Each week, the Germans--along with their junior partners in France--are putting the hammer to the Greeks. Cut public sector spending. Cut worker salaries. Cut pensions. Sell the airports and trains. And this week demands to cut private sector salaries by 25%. Now, German ministers have taken the final, inevitable step and suggested that Greece must have a fiscal overlord to set budgets and spending levels.

While the world has focused on Greece's failures--with the implication that it was German beneficence that allowed Greek participation in the euro in the first place--it is easy to lose sight of the fact that Germany has been the greatest beneficiary of the creation of the eurozone. The advent of the common currency eurozone with 330 million people created a massive, captive market for the German export machine. After China and ahead of the United States, Germany is the second largest exporting nation on earth, and the bulk of what it sells is to other European countries. There are no innocents in this morality tale. All those Greek bonds and Italian bonds and Spanish bonds and other bonds that are now at risk were issued to sustain an economic bubble of consumerism from which German exporters were among the largest beneficiaries. If Greece lied on its application for admission, the Germans had good reason to look the other way.

Those who have benefited from the euro want it to survive this crisis. Failure is not an option--insisted European Central Bank member this weekend. It is not an option for Germany, whose currency would skyrocket if the eurozone nations went their separate ways, punishing its export-dependent economy. It is not an option for France, for whom the euro is the key both to containing the German colossus with which it has fought several wars and to creating a counterweight to U.S. global power and prestige. It is not an option for China, that badly needs an alternative currency to the dollar for its massive foreign currency holdings.

And then there are the financial imperatives of achieving an orderly unwinding of the exposure of the European banks to Greek default risk. Each week, we are assured, a deal to restructure Greek debt--theoretically averting a default--is almost done. The parameters of such a deal are not in question. The banks holding Greek bonds would write off more than half of the value of their bonds against their fictitious capital reserves--fictitious because those reserves have been invested in sovereign euro-denominated bonds, among which are these very same Greek bonds. Hedge funds will be strong-armed into accepting the same deal, though their write-offs will be against their own--rather than other people's--money.

But essential to the suggested resolution would be the forbearance by the ISDA--the International Swap Dealers Association--in pronouncing that no "credit event" has taken place, such that those same banks will not have to pay out on credit event losses as the sellers of credit default swaps against those same Greek bonds. Such an outcome would seem to be unlikely based on the merits, but in a world that has dangerously comingled the financial and the political, anything is possible.

For all of this--to sustain the illusions that are Europe and the stability of its banks--all that is asked of Greece is that it voluntary cede its powers of democracy and self-determination. Yes, Greeks can still elect their leaders, but those leaders will no longer control the destiny of the nation.

But even if a default by Greece on its March 20th bond payment is diverted, nothing will actually have been solved. At best, a new package of loans will be arranged, and the default will be delayed until some later date.

This solution is backwards. Instead of affirming Greece's responsibility for its own choices, it will have been stripped of its sovereignty. Instead of having to face up to the challenge of building its own future with real rules--as ultimately each nation must--it will move forward instead as a vassal state to its Franco-German overlords.

Perhaps it is time to gather those ministers and elected leaders into a room and tell them to go home. For all of their sakes, perhaps it is time that they open their eyes and let Greece be Greece. Better now than later, because all is not proceeding according to plan.

Because there is no plan. They are just making it up as they go along.

:
a state or condition of worldwide relevance or impact;

universality, totality

"The next wave of competitors

will dwarf what has come before."

We’re now hurling towards an era called “globality,” a hypercompetitive world in which established Western companies defend turf they used to take for granted, while challengers in developing markets force them to conduct business in brand new ways. We’ll “competing with everyone from everywhere for everything.

Globality means that many companies from many locations are fundamentally changing the way global business operates. It involves many players with many products moving at an eye-popping pace.

“This tsunami will make all the previous waves look like a ripple.”

What exactly is globality? More than a single definition, it is a set of characteristics
:

1. The rise of rapidly developing countries is changing the world of business.
2. A new generation of companies that will be the next Toyotas, Hondas, Wal-Marts, et cetera are descending on current markets fast and hard enough to be termed a “tsunami.”
3. Globalization is over. The era we’re in, called “globality,” will involve companies—especially from Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRIC)—competing for talent and natural resources all over the world, from small towns to big cities.
4. The rules of success will be very different in the future.
5. Globality is about making the right choices, because you can’t do everything.

1. The rise of rapidly developing countries is changing the world of business.
2. A new generation of companies that will be the next Toyotas, Hondas, Wal-Marts, et cetera are descending on current markets fast and hard enough to be termed a “tsunami.”
3. Globalization is over. The era we’re in, called “globality,” will involve companies—especially from Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRIC)—competing for talent and natural resources all over the world, from small towns to big cities.
4. The rules of success will be very different in the future.
5. Globality is about making the right choices, because you can’t do everything.

The Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in India

For amassing a trove of biometric identification to activate benefits for millions of Indians. The government office is using multimodal biometrics--fingerprints, iris scans, and photographs--to build the world's most ambitious identity database. A mammoth ecosystem of agencies deploys its open, scalable model, and the robust system can enroll the identities of a million people a day with 99.99% accuracy. It authenticates people over a mobile phone network using a one-time password or their fingerprints (illiteracy is a problem in India). In the process, it enables instant, paperless provisioning of banking services and welfare benefits to millions of Indians who lacked any identification until now. At last count, 450 million Indians had received their new IDs and used them to make 40 million cash transfers. Read more >>

For dialing into the very Indian "missed call" money-saving tactic. ZipDial's marketing and analytics platform is fashioned out of the ingenious practice of escaping a charge by calling and hanging up to convey a predecided message. Its unique business model works by providing a number for brands to publish on their marketing campaigns. So far, ZipDial has targeted 416 million callers for clients like Disney, Dove, and Coca-Cola, which can now text customers about new deals and product launches. India's largest political parties, the Congress and the BJP, have recently signed up, which means ZipDial is now headed for the mainstream. The service just launched in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, and will soon be in Indonesia and the Philippines. Read more >>

For bringing the Internet to India's vast underconnected masses. Innoz's SMSGyan allows feature-phone users to access the Internet anytime and from anywhere by facilitating their web searches via text messages. The service has processed 1.3 billion queries so far and has more than 120 million active users, mostly in India. But the service is also growing in Africa, the Middle East, and other parts of Asia. Innoz was launched by a group of engineering college dropouts who came upon the idea when they weren't able to search for "How to woo girls" on their very basic phones.

For galvanizing a behavior shift in urban India to care for those in need. Goonj channels excess resources from urban households to impoverished, rural, and disaster-struck areas. In exchange for clothes, furniture, household goods, and medical supplies, village and slum communities self-organize and build schools, roads, and toilet facilities. The company has thus turned used clothes and other second-hand material into currency, successfully leading more than 1,500 such projects in the past three years alone. It recently delivered thousands of tons of material to the floodstruck in the Himalayas, to cyclone victims in eastern Orissa, and to victims of communal violence in central Muzaffarnagar, through a network of schools and nonprofits. In a large country, Goonj is a game-changer, teaching urban Indians when, what, and how to give.

For improving the country's mess of a public-toilet network. Not long ago, Bill Gates let the world know that he was serious about building a better toilet. Eram Scientific Solutions, which makes the Gates Foundation–backed Delight public toilet system, is just proof that the man delivers on his promises. The company's toilet flushes automatically--when people enter, after they leave, and every two hours--to keep tidy, but it also saves energy with motion-sensor lights and fans. Four hundred of them have been installed across the country so far, with a reported 6,000 in the pipeline.

For rethinking conventional cancer drug therapies by applying data analytics. Though it saves lives, chemotherapy--in which enough toxins are pumped into the patient's body to kill malignant cells but spare the host--is still a risky process. Founded by Harvard and MIT researchers, Mitra Biotech's CANScript technology re-creates an artificial environment for a patient's tumor sample and tests various drugs on it directly, allowing the company to arrive at a personalized treatment in less than a week. Mitra has formed partnerships with several Indian hospitals and is eyeing a U.S. entry.

For leveling the playing ground for coders all over the world. Interviewstreet's disruptive platform helps screen and hire programmers through online coding tests and contests, thus matching best performers from around the globe to business titans. Interviewstreet counts Facebook, Amazon, Morgan Stanley, Zynga, and Walmart among its customers, and it recently placed 40 Indian computer-science students in some of the hottest jobs in the Valley just as they were finishing up their degrees.

For putting smiles on thousands of faces with a Starbucks-inspired chain of dental offices. MyDentist is a two-year-old dental chain based in Mumbai and Pune that has brought dimensions of the retail business to dental treatment. With 75 locations throughout the country, which will grow to 150 this year, MyDentist offers efficient care at standard, transparent rates. It's affordable to the underprivileged crowd, such as cab drivers and domestic workers, who live in slum areas: Root canal treatments cost just 2,500 rupees ($40), and 21,000-rupee braces can be paid in 1,500-rupee ($24) installments. The chain treats a whopping 15,000 patients each month.

For smoothing the journey of India's growing but scrappy car rental market. Within a year of its launch, Olacabs has grown to become India's largest car rental brand. Its success lies in the myriad tech solutions it uses to navigate the chaos of India's urban commuter system: Its mobile app lets a user summon a cab with a single click and allows real-time tracking of the cab as it nears. Meanwhile, Olacabs' predictive algorithm helps anticipate demand at different locations and times, monitors traffic and weather conditions, and, after a customer books, accurately predicts the time of arrival. Olacabs currently aggregates 7,500 cars in India's four largest cities and achieves an explosive 25% month-over-month growth rate.

For delivering world-class services and health care to expectant mothers. Despite the ongoing efforts of India's government, the country still lags behind much of the world in infant and maternal mortality rates. Cloudnine, however, has managed to sustain a 0% maternal mortality rate and a 99.72% survival rate across 16,000 deliveries at its five Bangalore-based health-care facilities. The company, which recently scored $16 million in a funding round led by Sequoia Capital, credits its all-hands approach for its success: Its hospitals contain standard pregnancy and neonatal care but also feature specialized units for fetal medicine and workshops for first-time parents.

B e w a r e

China

simply does NOT work or think like us

It is clear that WE, Western People,

we are Not

psychologically and intellectually

ready

to think seriously

about the terms

for sharing power with China

in the near and long-term.

We are - too - too complacent about the deep faults in our economic structures, and too wasteful in dissipating trillions on chimerical ventures aimed at exorcising a mythical enemy to position ourselves for a diplomatic undertaking of the sort that a self-centered America has never before faced. We had better take note that indeed the times are a'changin' lest we wind up worse off than we need to be.

... la Chine continuera à financer

les économies européennes

et américaines

en achetant les obligations en dollars

comme en euros.

(30 August 2011)

... Miscalculation is leading us down dark alleys...

Every day we wait & miscalculate,

China is going to eat "our" lunch

The Beijing Consensus

What is "The Beijing Consensus" ?

Based on more than 100 interviews with Chinese officials, scholars and businesspeople, The Beijing Consensus offers a new look at what China has accomplished in 30 years of reform and the complex puzzles that lie ahead. Ramo’s analysis shows how the country’s emergence is unique in history, while highlighting the challenges China’s rapid rate of change poses for both Chinese and the rest of the world.

First published by the Foreign Policy Centre in London, it has been widely circulated in both English and Chinese, and has been the subject of numerous academic conferences in China and abroad.

The Beijing Consensus:

How China's Authoritarian

Model Will Dominate

the Twenty-First Century

Stefan Halper

Stefan Halper cogently rejects the conventional wisdom that suggests America's relationship with China is on track in this lucid, probing text. Moving beyond approaches to China that focus on its burgeoning economic dominance, the book—in the vein of Martin Jacques's recent When China Rules the World—underscores the political and cultural challenge that a rising China presents.

Halper (coauthor of America Alone), a fellow at the University of Cambridge, contends that there is little possibility of a genuine partnership between China and the U.S.;

continued growth will not lead China's political system to become any more free or open, and its brand of authoritarian capitalism will compete with the West's democratic ideal as a possible model for the developing world.

Though his position may seem pessimistic, the author does believe that China's concern with its prestige in the world gives the United States leverage in its attempt to shape the geopolitics, and he concludes this sobering, excellently argued book with a series of concrete policy recommendations to that end.

...e perchè Noi buttiamo al vento

le nostre lotte

e i nostri sacrifici passati ?

Io, Paola Zaino dico

:

"Ragioniamoci BENE sopra"

... Miscalculation is leading us down dark alleys...

No Chance Against China

Google's defeat foretells the day

when Beijing rules the world.

****! What just happened?Say you're a company. A good one, maybe even a great one. You're doing everything right but one day you wake up and everything's changed. And it isn't just a brutal recession. It's three things, all at once. One, new economics--suddenly it's all about China and India. Two, a new way for everyone to talk--social networks are the new lingua franca. And three, there's a new voice--the Millennials just showed up in the workforce and politics. No wonder there's "a gap between market awareness and business readiness"

A convincing economic, political and cultural analysis of waning Western dominance and the rise of China and a new paradigm of modernity. Jacques (The Politics of Thatcherism) takes the pulse of the nation poised to become, by virtue of its scale and staggering rate of growth, the biggest market in the world. Jacques points to the decline of American hegemony and outlines specific elements of China's rising global power and how these are likely to influence international relations in the future.

He imagines a world where China's distinct brand of modernity, rooted firmly in its ancient culture and traditions, will have a profound influence on attitudes toward work, family and even politics that will become a counterbalance to and eventually reverse the one-way flow of Westernization. He suggests that while China's economic prosperity may not necessarily translate into democracy, China's increased self-confidence is allowing it to project its political and cultural identity ever more widely as time goes on. As comprehensive as it is compelling, this brilliant book is crucial reading for anyone interested in understanding where we areand where we are going.

Mostnew chief executives are taken aback by the unexpected and unfamiliar new roles, the time and information limitations, and the altered professional relationships they run up against. Here are the common surprises new CEOs face, and here's how to tell when adjustments are necessary.

Surprise One:You Can't Run the Company

Warning signs:

You are in too many meetings and involved in too many tactical discussions.

There are too many days when you feel as though you have lost control over your time.

Surprise Two:Giving Orders is Very Costly

Warning signs:

You have become the bottleneck.

Employees are overly inclined to consult you before they act.

People start using your name to endorse things, as in "Frank says…"

Surprise Three:It Is Hard To Know What Is Really Going On

Warning signs:

You keep hearing things that surprise you.

You learn about events after the fact.

You hear concerns and dissenting views through the grapevine rather than directly.

People around you act in ways that indicate they're trying to anticipate your likes and dislikes.

Surprise Five:You Are Not The Boss

Warning signs:

You don't know where you stand with board members.

Roles and responsibilities of the board members and of management are not clear.

The discussions in board meetings are limited mostly to reporting on results and management's decisions.

Surprise Six:Pleasing Shareholders Is Not The Goal

Warning signs:

Executives and board members judge actions by their effect on stock price.

Analysts who don't understand the business push for decisions that risk the health of the company.

Management incentives are disproportionately tied to stock price.

Surprise Seven:You Are Still Only Human

Warning signs:

You give interviews about you rather than about the company.

Your lifestyle is more lavish or privileged than that of other top executives in the company.

You have few if any activities not connected to the company.

Implications for CEO Leadership

Taken together, the seven surprises carry some important and subtle implications for how a new CEO should define his job.

First, the CEO must learn to manage organizational context rather than focus on daily operations. Providing leadership in this way—and not diving into the details—can be a jarring transition. One CEO said that he initially felt like the company's "most useless executive," despite the power inherent in the job. The CEO needs to learn how to act in indirect ways—setting and communicating strategy, putting sound processes in place, selecting and mentoring key people—to create the conditions that will help others make the right choices. At the same time, he must set the tone and define the organization's culture and values through his words and actions—in other words, demonstrate how employees should behave.

Second, he must recognize that his position does not confer the right to lead, nor does it guarantee the organization's loyalty. He must perpetually earn and maintain the moral mandate to lead. CEOs can easily lose their legitimacy if their vision is unconvincing, if their actions are inconsistent with the values they espouse, or if their self-interest appears to trump the welfare of the organization. They must realize that success ultimately depends on their ability to enlist the voluntary commitment rather than the forced obedience of others. While mastering the conventional tools of management may have won the CEO his job, these tools alone will not keep him there.

Finally, the CEO must not get totally absorbed in the role. Even if others think he is omnipotent, he is still only human. Failing to recognize this will lead to arrogance, exhaustion, and a shortened tenure. Only by maintaining a personal balance and staying grounded can the CEO achieve the perspective required to make decisions in the interest of the company and its long-term prosperity.

Andare ad ascoltare una lezione di Martin Linsky

"...What the world, and Obama, needs in these unusual times, is not technical expertise, which can be rented or purchased or borrowed anytime in the marketplace, but people of judgment and character who have the capacity to adapt to new, unforeseen circumstances."

The speed of change and the need to adapt to unfamiliar realities require making difficult choices.

Deciding what needs to be preserved and what must be left behind in order to survive and thrive in a rapidly moving future, generates conflict, is chaotic, and requires courage.(1)

Leadership is about disappointing your people at a rate they can absorb," says Martin Linsky, faculty chair of Leadership for the 21st Century. "It's about delivering losses.The resistance comes when people experience your initiatives as a threat.This class is about how to get them through those feelings."

To be a leader, you sometimes have to be the bad guy and give up any dreams of being adored by employees. If that sounds tough, it is. The first two course days are a harrowing breakdown of what people think about leadership. Instead of resolving conflict, students learn how to manage and understand it. "Most people come to the program knowing in their gut what they need to do," says Linsky. "They need to put themselves and their organization at risk. It takes courage to take these risks."

Students' Evaluations

Larry Whitney, a VP at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, applied 90% of what he learned in the course at work the next week. Namely, how to shake things up. "You have to get people upset. When things get disruptive, people really get work done, and learning takes place." As someone who considers himself kind of a sensitive, new-age guy, Whitney had difficulty adapting. "When people are attacking me, they're attacking my role as a leader, not me personally," he realized. Results were swift: Whitney took his team from "just below the middle of the pack" to the first quartile.

“Leadership for the 21st Century gave me the unparalleled opportunity to look deep within myself and to work hard to unlock any barriers that existed to my own self-development. I learned about my comfort zones – and I stepped out of them. Understanding better why I make certain choices, why I hold certain values so dear, and how to stretch my mind to new limits has helped me become a better professional, colleague, and person. – Participant, October 2003

“At the start of Leadership for the 21st Century, I was frustrated, mad, and uncomfortable. Never before had I been forced to examine myself so closely. By the program’s end, I was truly a different person. I was reenergized and renewed and I had a greater level of selfawareness than I’d ever had in my life. Leadership for the 21st Century was just the experience I needed at a crossroad in my career and in my
life. In some ways, my experience moved me beyond words. The dedication and investment of the faculty, staff, and other participants to making this a life-changing experience is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.”

Leadership is about disappointing your people at a rate they can absorb," says Martin Linsky, faculty chair of Leadership for the 21st Century. "It's about delivering losses. The resistance comes when people experience your initiatives as a threat. This class is about how to get them through those feelings." To be a leader, you sometimes have to be the bad guy and give up any dreams of being adored by employees. If that sounds tough, it is. The first two course days are a harrowing breakdown of what people think about leadership. Instead of resolving conflict, students learn how to manage and understand it.

"Most people come to the program knowing in their gut what they need to do," says Linsky. "They need to put themselves and their organization at risk. It takes courage to take these risks."

About Marty Linsky :

"Marty Linsky forced me to work outside my preferences, and he made me feel very uncomfortable at times. I learned tremendously from it."

American and Crisis of Global Power

The world is now interactive and interdependent. It is also, for the first time, a world in which the problems of human survival have begun to overshadow more traditional international conflicts. Unfortunately, the major powers have yet to undertake globally cooperative responses to the new and increasingly grave challenges to human wellbeing--environmental, climatic, socioeconomic, nutritional, or demographic.

And without basic geopolitical stability, any effort to achieve the necessary global cooperation will falter. Indeed, the changing distribution of global power and the new phenomenon of massive political awakening intensify, each in its own way, the volatility of contemporary international relations. As China's influence grows and as other emerging powers--Russia or India or Brazil for example--compete with each other for resources, security, and economic advantage, the potential for miscalculation and conflict increases.

Accordingly, the United States must seek to shape a broader geopolitical foundation for constructive cooperation in the global arena, while accommodating the rising aspirations of an increasingly restless global population.

With the foregoing in mind, this book seeks to respond to four major questions:

1. What are the implications of the changing distribution of global power from the West to the East, and how is it being affected by the new reality of a politically awakened humanity?

2. Why is America's global appeal waning, what are the symptoms of America's domestic and international decline, and how did America waste the unique global opportunity offered by the peaceful end of the Cold War? Conversely, what are America's recuperative strengths and what geopolitical reorientation is necessary to revitalize America's world role?

3. What would be the likely geopolitical consequences if America declined from its globally preeminent position, who would be the almost-immediate geopolitical victims of such a decline, what effects would it have on the global-scale problems of the twentyfirst century, and could China assume America's central role in world affairs by 2025?

4. Looking beyond 2025, how should a resurgent America define its long-term geopolitical goals, and how could America, with its traditional European allies, seek to engage Turkey and Russia in order to construct an even larger and more vigorous West? Simultaneously, how could America achieve balance in the East between the need for close cooperation with China and the fact that a constructive American role in Asia should be neither exclusively China-centric nor involve dangerous entanglements in Asian conflicts?

In answering these questions this book will argue that America's role in the world will continue to be essential in the years to come. Indeed, the ongoing changes in the distribution of global power and mounting global strife make it all the more imperative that America not retreat into an ignorant garrison-state mentality or wallow in self-righteous cultural hedonism. Such an America could cause the geopolitical prospects of an evolving world--in which the center of gravity is shifting from West to East--to become increasingly grave. The world needs an America that is economically vital, socially appealing, responsibly powerful, strategically deliberate, internationally respected, and historically enlightened in its global engagement with the new East.

How likely is such a globally purposeful America? Today, America's historical mood is uneasy, and notions of America's decline as historically inevitable are intellectually fashionable. However, this kind of periodic pessimism is neither novel nor self-fulfilling. Even the belief that the twentieth century was "America's century," which became widespread in the wake of World War II, did not preclude phases of anxiety regarding America's long-range future.

When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, its first orbital satellite, during the Eisenhower administration, Americans became concerned about their prospects in both peaceful competition and strategic warfare.

And again, when the United States failed to achieve a meaningful victory in Vietnam during the Nixon years, Soviet leaders confidently predicted America's demise while historically pessimistic American policy makers sought détente in exchange for the status quo in the divided Europe. But America proved to be more resilient and the Soviet system eventually imploded.

By 1991, following the disintegration both of the Soviet bloc and then the Soviet Union itself, the United States was left standing as the only global superpower. Not only the twentieth but even the twenty-first century then seemed destined to be the American centuries. Both President Bill Clinton and President George W. Bush confidently asserted as much. And academic circles echoed them with bold prognoses that the end of the Cold War meant in effect "the end of history" insofar as doctrinal debates regarding the relative superiority of competing social systems was concerned.

The victory of liberal democracy was proclaimed not only as decisive but also as final. Given that liberal democracy had flowered first in the West, the implied assumption was that henceforth the West would be the defining standard for the world.

However, such super-optimism did not last long. The culture of self gratification and deregulation that began during the Clinton years and continued under President George W. Bush led to the bursting of one stock market bubble at the turn of the century and a full-scale financial crash less than a decade later. The costly unilateralism of the younger Bush presidency led to a decade of war in the Middle East and the derailment of American foreign policy at large. The financial catastrophe of 2008 nearly precipitated a calamitous economic depression, jolting America and much of the West into a sudden recognition of their systemic vulnerability to unregulated greed.

Moreover, in China and other Asian states a perplexing amalgam of economic liberalism and state capitalism demonstrated a surprising capacity for economic growth and technological innovation. This in turn prompted new anxiety about the future of America's status as the leading world power.

Indeed, there are several alarming similarities between the Soviet Union in the years just prior to its fall and the America of the early twenty-first century. The Soviet Union, with an increasingly gridlocked governmental system incapable of enacting serious policy revisions, in effect bankrupted itself by committing an inordinate percentage of its GNP to a decades-long military rivalry with the United States and exacerbated this problem by taking on the additional costs of a decadelong attempt to conquer Afghanistan. Not surprisingly, it could not afford to sustain its competition with America in cutting-edge technological sectors and thus fell further behind; its economy stumbled and the society's quality of life further deteriorated in comparison to the West; its ruling Communist class became cynically insensitive to widening social disparities while hypocritically masking its own privileged life-style; and finally, in foreign affairs it became increasingly selfisolated, while precipitating a geopolitically damaging hostility with its once-prime Eurasian ally, Communist China.

These parallels, even if overdrawn, fortify the case that America must renew itself and pursue a comprehensive and long-term geopolitical vision, one that is responsive to the challenges of the changing historical context. Only a dynamic and strategically minded America, together with a unifying Europe, can jointly promote a larger and more vital West, one capable of acting as a responsible partner to the rising and increasingly assertive East. Otherwise, a geopolitically divided and selfcentered West could slide into a historical decline reminiscent of the humiliating impotence of nineteenth-century China, while the East might be tempted to replicate the self-destructive power rivalries of twentieth-century Europe.

In brief, the crisis of global power is the cumulative consequence of the dynamic shift in the world's center of gravity from the West to the East, of the accelerated surfacing of the restless phenomenon of global political awakening, and of America's deficient domestic and international performance since its emergence by 1990 as the world's only superpower.

The foregoing poses serious longer-term risks to the survival of some endangered states, to the security of the global commons, and to global stability at large. This book seeks to outline the needed strategic vision, looking beyond 2025.

Strategic Vision

:

America and the Crisis of Global Power

By 1991, following the disintegration first of the Soviet bloc and then of the Soviet Union itself, the United States was left standing tall as the only global super-power. Not only the 20th but even the 21st century seemed

destined to be the American centuries. But that super-optimism did not last long. During the last decade of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century, the stock market bubble and the costly foreign unilateralism of the younger Bush presidency, as well as the financial catastrophe of 2008 jolted America – and much of the West – into a sudden recognition of its systemic vulnerability to unregulated greed. Moreover, the East was demonstrating a surprising capacity for economic growth and technological innovation. That prompted new anxiety about the future, including even about America’s status as the leading world power. This book is a response to a challenge. It argues that without an America that is economically vital, socially appealing, responsibly powerful, and capable of sustaining an intelligent foreign engagement, the geopolitical prospects for the West could become increasingly grave. The ongoing changes in the distribution of global power and mounting global strife make it all the more essential that America does not retreat into an ignorant garrison-state mentality or wallow in cultural hedonism but rather becomes more strategically deliberate and historically enlightened in its global engagement with the new East. This book seeks to answer four major questions:1. What are the implications of the changing distribution of global power from West to East, and how is it being affected by the new reality of a politically awakened humanity? 2. Why is America’s global appeal waning, how ominous are the symptoms of America’s domestic and international decline, and how did America waste the unique global opportunity offered by the peaceful end of the Cold War?
3. What would be the likely geopolitical consequences if America did decline by 2025, and could China then assume America’s central role in world affairs?
4. What ought to be a resurgent America’s major long-term geopolitical goals in order to shape a more vital and larger West and to engage cooperatively the emerging and dynamic new East?

America, Brzezinski argues, must define and pursue a comprehensive and long-term a geopolitical vision, a vision that is responsive to the challenges of the changing historical context. This book seeks to provide the strategic blueprint for that vision.

This review is from: Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power (Hardcover)

In "Strategic Vision," Zbigniew Brzezinski, a foreign policy expert and former National Security Adviser, offers a concise and cogent analysis of the reasons behind the decline in America's global standing, and the dangers that are sure to follow if we let that decline continue. The book is well-written, readable and at 225 pages fairly short for a a book written by someone of Brzezinski's stature on such a broad subject.

Brzezinski provides the expected analysis of America's rise as a global power and a brief comparison to other empires throughout history, as well as the most important reasons behind the recent decline in U.S. influence. He argues strongly that a strong United States is vital to global stability for the foreseeable future. He does not think that China, for example, will be in a position to assume the current U.S. role even by 2025 and beyond.

If the U.S. fails to maintain its stabilizing influence, Brzezinski foresees global chaos, uncertainty and increased tensions between nations. Countries will be less apt to cooperate and more inclined to pursue pure self-interest, and this will happen during a time when collaboration on issues like climate change and terrorism will be more and more crucial. Brzezinski calls for the U.S. to fulfill a "dual role" going forward: First it must secure and strengthen the countries that make up the West. Second it needs balance and mediate between the rising powers in the East, especially China, India and Japan. In order to do this, of course, the U.S. needs to fix its domestic problems and regain credibility.

Once thing I really liked is that fact that, even in a fairly short book on global issues, the author gave an entire chapter to the issue of the U.S. domestic and economic problems. It is clear that America's ability to fulfill its global role rests entirely on the strength of its economy. And issues like unemployment, declining wages for most people, soaring inequality, and political gridlock are likely to undermine restoration of domestic strength.

One place the book falls short is in its failure to consider the issue of advancing technology and what it will mean for both domestic and foreign policy. It is pretty clear that employers in the U.S. no longer need to hire as many people as they used to. Half of college graduates are not finding jobs that require college degrees. This is not just because of the recession; structural changes are taking place.

Information technology is advancing faster and faster. We celebrate new companies like Google and Facebook, but they only create a tiny number of jobs.

This is going to be a vital issue for nearly every advanced country over the next 10 to 20 years and will have a huge impact on geopolitics and on how countries compete economically. "Strategic Vision" is highly recommend, but it is also important to start thinking about how technology is changing things, and the policies that will be required to adapt to those changes.

Tuesday, 30 June 2015

LEADERSHIP FOR THE NEW COMMONS

The Challenge

We live in a time of dramatic change—a hinge point in history—and there is a critical need for a new practice of the art of leadership.In a world characterized by increased complexity, diversity, and moral ambiguity, we drift into polarization.Narrow, single-issue politics and role-based morality feed growing dysfunction, injustice, environmental deterioration, and the loss of community.We need leaders who can see things whole, who are committed to the common good, and who have both the moral courage and the skill to work on behalf of a more compassionate, just, sustainable, and prosperous future.Such leaders have a keen sense of our interdependence, a deep sense of worthy purpose, and the capacity and commitment to enhance the quality of our collective life.

A key competence of such leaders is the ability to see how their own sector relates to other sectors of society and to the natural world that together make up “the new commons.”This new, complex commons requires integral leadership—the capacity to integrate a depth of inner spiritual and ethical awareness with thoughtful, skillful, and creative action in the outer world, particularly in the face of radical uncertainty.

A hunger for this kind of leadership is showing up in every domain, and we are at a point where inadequately addressed and critical issues are starting to overtake our capacity to deal with them.There is a vital need for leaders who can recognize the interdependent features of emerging conditions, ask new questions, imagine alternative possibilities, and skillfully navigate within complex dynamics to enable organizations and the wider society to create more viable modes of working together on behalf of our common future.

A Creative

and

Distinctive Response

Leadership for the New Commons is a response to the call for informed, morallycourageous, effective leadership that is a match for the economic, ecological, and cultural conditions in which we now find ourselves—leadership with new skills and new animating myths—new ways of seeing and working.

Such leadership is characterized by three distinctive capacities

:

·Consciousness:A compelling awareness of interdependenceand connectivity that is grounded in an understanding of the ecology of the natural environment (the more-than-human world).This complex interdependence requires a re-alignment of our cultural, social, political, and economic arrangements toward the development of a more hopeful future for all.

·Conscience:A spiritual and ethical awarenessand commitment that arises from this consciousness of the interdependence of all life, embracing both suffering and wonder—the Mystery we all share.Such awareness is informed by historic faith traditions and by contemporary, emergent spiritual insight.It provides orientation, purpose, meaning, and depth—and is manifest in hope, reverence, compassion, imagination, courage, moral-ethical accountability, and the capacity to hold steady and stay the course.

·Competence:The confidence and skill to recognize and respond to the toughest problems—those that fall in the space between known problems and unknown solutions.Such challenges require bold action.And this action must embody anticipatory learning, skillful innovation, new patterns of thought and behavior, profound collaboration, resistance to false solutions, and the creation of new realities (often involving conflict, loss, and grief) on behalf of a positive future for all.

To these ends, Leadership for the New Commons recognizes “the commons” as a place, an aspiration, and a metaphor.“The commons” is the image that informs the “common good.”The commons (by whatever name) is the place where people gather and experience a shared life within a manageable frame:the crossroads of a village, the great plazas of European cities, a New England green, Main Street, the playground, the marketplace, or a cathedral, mosque, synagogue or temple.The commons is a place of celebration and memorial, commerce and communication, play and protest.

Key elements that constitute the commons—water, food sources, air, government, language, a monetary system, ritual, art, etc. are ideally accessible to all, and thus the notion of the commons presses toward inclusion.But the commons is always imperfectly practiced—slaves were sold on the commons, Quakers and Jesuits were hanged on Boston Common, and hundreds were killed in Tianamen Square.Thus the commons is both a reality and an aspiration.The commons, as metaphor, does what good metaphors do—it conveys complex but interdependent realities.

Today we are all swept up into “a new global commons.”

How we are all going to dwell together within this new commons is an urgent question at this critical turning in our history.

In this new commons, the environmental challenge in which we now find ourselves is not merely one issue among many.It is a key, orienting issue that touches and potentially reorders everything else.

Monday, 29 June 2015

"Changing the world starts in your own community"

Kofi Annan

We know that Vision is within our grasp. But we also know that it will only become a reality if a new generation of leaders emerges with us, nurtured by those who've already succeeded and are ambitious for change.